BELIEVE IN COD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY, 



^ Maker of heaven and earth. 

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our 
Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
Born ofthe Virgin Mary,Suffered under Pontius 
Pilate, Was crucified, dead and buried, He de- 
scended into Hellj The third day He rose aqain 
from the dead, He ascended into Heaven, And 
sitteth on the right hand of Cod the Father 
Almighty, from thence He shall come to «iiudqe 
the quick and the dead. 

I believe in the Holy Ohost; The Holy Cath- 
olic Churchj The Communion of Saintsj The 
Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the 

BODY, AND THE LiFE EVERLASTilNG. A^EN, 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

wn-^\ 

Shelf ..3:£./ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



I Believe in God 

THE Father Almighty 



I BELIEVE IN GOD THE 
FATHER ALMIGHTY. 



BY 

JOHN HENRY BARROWS, 



"^/noy^ 



Fleming H. Revell Company, 

CHICAGO: I NEW YORK : 

148 AND 150 Madison St. I 30 Union Square : East 

Publishers of Evangelical Literature, 



\-% 



<\VX^ 



1 






Eqte red according to Act of Congress, iq t/]e year 1892, 
by Fleming U. Ffeuell Company, iq the Office of the 
Librariaq of Congress at Washington, D, C. /}// 
rigfjts reserved. 



,b;3 



WaSHiNGTON 



TO THE 
YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN OF AMERICA, 

With the prayerful hope 

that this book may confirm them in the joyful faith, 

with which they repeat, cfrom its first great 

words to its closing affirmations, 

the golden sentences 

of 
The Apostles' Creed. 



THE APOSTLES' CREED. 



I Believe in God, the Father Almighty, 

Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His 
only Son our Lord ; who was conceived by the Holy 
Ghost ; born of the Virgin Mary ; suffered under 
Pontius Pilate ; was crucified, dead, and buried. He 
descended into hell. The third day He rose from the 
dead. He ascended into Heaven and sitteth on the 
right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From 
thence He shall come to judge the quick and the 
dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost ; the Holy Catho- 
lic Church ; the communion of saints ; the forgive- 
ness of sins ; the resurrection of the body, and the 
life everlasting. Amen. 



CONTENTS 



• • • 



The Strength of Theism 9 

God's Three Revelations of Himself . . 37 

The Eternity of God 67 

The Truth and Comfort of Theism . . 97 



The strength of Theism 



Cf^e Strengtl^ of Cl^ctsm, 



For every house is builded by some 
one^ but He that built all things 
is God:' -—Heb, s :4, 



IN these words the common sense of 
mankind finds expression. Every work 
of contrivance demands a contriver ; ev- 
ery work which goes beyond the power 
of human organization demands a super- 
human creator. It is ** an incomparably 
great thing," as Rothe has said, **to affirm 
the existence of God," and this princely 
thinker of Germany declares that we are 
indebted to modern atheistic philosophy 
for making us vividly conscious how 
grand a thing it is to affirm that there is a 
God. The prolonged discussions of our 
times are not only strengthening the foun- 
dations on which rests the practically uni- 

[91 



10 3 Beltepe in ®ob. 

versal belief in a Personal First Cause, are 
not only enlarging the popular conception 
of the greatness and glory of the Creator, 
but are also making it plain that the su- 
preme affirmation which the human mind 
can make is this : '' I believe in God." 
Resurrection, miracles, the incarnation, 
the atonement, are superstructures ; this 
is the foundation. 

But in our time, as in other ages, this 
foundation is attacked. We are informed 
and instructed, not so much that God is 
not, as that we do not know whether or 
not God is. That is, agnosticism is the 
present form of the anti-theistic spirit. 
We are told that science (and science is 
assumed to be the limit of human knowl- 
edge) neither proves nor disproves the 
existence of an Infinite Personal Being. 
This is about as far as cautious doubt ordi- 
narily creeps. The atheist of to-day tries 
to keep his mind in this suspended state, 



CI?e Strengtl? of Ctjetsm. 11 

yielding neither to the evidences that 
God is, nor to the theories which would 
account for a universe without a God. A 
century ago, men were more positive. 
The revolutionary atheists of France, who 
had gained possession of the government, 
issued a decree prohibiting the worship of 
God, dethroning Him from His supremacy ! 
In the Cathedral of Notre Dame they 
knelt before a new deity of their own 
selection, the Goddess of Reason, personi- 
fied by a degraded woman. Coleridge 
has thus daringly depicted the spirit of 
that day : — 

** Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, 
(Portentous sight !) the owlet Atheism, 
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, 
Drops his blue-fringed lids and holds them close, 
And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven. 
Cries out, * Where is it ? ' " 

But such is not the usual temper of the 
present atheism. Its fortress is the igno- 



,12 3 Beltepe in <So6. 

ranee of man as to what lies back of the 
outward appearance of things. It does 
not go beyond phenomena and so^alled 
second causes. It acknowledges the facts 
and forces of the universe, but denies that 
we can go behind them and affirm any- 
thing positive of their origin. In this 
denial it is guilty of stupendous folly. 
** Every house is builded by some one," 
says the general reason of the race. 
**Yes," IS the reply, *' but as to who or 
what built all things we cannot know, for 
we were not there." 

In maintaining this position, modern 
atheism deems itself very courteous, mod- 
est, and wise. It does not claim to be 
happy ; it does not pretend to be con- 
tented. Some of its literature is a long- 
drawn wail, sinking occasionally into a 
whine. This is natural. The intellect 
looking into this wonderful universe and 
refusing the only natural explanation of 



CI?e Strengtfj of (EI?etsm. 13 

it, must be restless. And the heart that 
is made for worship, acknowledging no 
supreme object of adoration, must be 
equally uneasy and unsatisfied. And 
when the floods of sorrow and the terror 
of death overwhelm and oppress the soul, 
and a positive faith in an omnipotent loVe 
is the foremost need, then it is that mod- 
ern agnosticism leaves its victims in such 
pitiful despair that human nature rises up 
against it. The intellect as well as the 
heart is hostile to this kind of knownoth- 
ingism. It may be as foolish for a man to 
say, '*I do not know," as to say, " I deny." 
Here is a book called the Bible, printed 
on finest paper, silk-sewed, bound and 
published in Oxford, one of the miracles 
of the printer's art. Taking it in his hand, 
one person says, **A skillful man must 
have planned and executed the printing 
of this beautiful book." He speaks the 
world's comrnon sense* Another man 



1^ 3 Beltcpc in ©ob. 

takes up the Bible, and says, ** I really do 
not know whether a human being printed 
this book or not. I never was in Oxford, 
and I certainly did not see the making of 
the book." A third man takes up the 
Bible and says, ''I deny that any human 
being printed this book." It is plain that 
the second and third men have stultified 
human reason and have stultified it equally, 
unless the cautious doubter manifests even 
a little more imbecility than the stubborn 
denier. 

The vice of agnosticism is that it is an 
attack on the trustworthiness of the hu- 
man faculties. It has been wisely said 
** that if a man cannot know God, he can- 
not know anything," that is, rationally and 
scientifically. The scientist makes all his 
investigations on the basis of certain prin- 
ciples, certain self-evident truths, and the 
common mind acts in the same way in 
coming to a knowledge of God. The 



Ct?e Strength? of trt?eism, 15 

scientist proceeds on the theory of causa- 
tion — that is, that every change must 
have an adequate cause — on the belief 
in nature's rationality and uniformity, and 
working on this basis, he trusts his con- 
clusions. Knowledge gained in this, the 
right way, he holds as certain in spite 
of the difficulties and inconceivabilities 
which beset some of his conclusions. 
These difficulties it has been said belong 
to science as well as to theology. If a 
man is to distrust his faculties when they 
lead him to God, then he must distrust 
them always. False in one part, they are 
not to be believed in another. Partial 
agnosticism leads to complete agnosticism, 
as has been frequently shown. The truth 
is, that man has such multiplex and over- 
whelming evidences for believing in God 
that agnosticism is the suicide of his 
rational nature. It is administering poi- 
son to all his nobler powers. It is a degrad- 



16 3 Beltepe in &ob. 

ing prostration of himself before what 
have been called *' the hideous idols of 
negation." It is remaining ** an eternal 
infant," that is, a living savage. Of course 
most agnostics deny or endeavor to con- 
ceal the fact that their system leads logic- 
ally to universal skepticism. But such is 
the truth. The . knowledge which men 
gain of the outer world rests on the trust- 
worthiness of certain self-evident truths 
which are equally the basis of science and 
theology. The death of one is the de- 
struction of the other. All must confess 
that theism is the constitutional belief of 
man, and that atheism, in any of its shapes, 
is the unnatural and uncertain mental at- 
titude of the few who must be regarded 
as the eccentrics of our race. It will be 
indefinitely less of a task to overturn the 
Copernican theory of astronomy, than to 
root out the belief in a personal God. 
The very generation when materialistic 



tEt?e Strength) of CI?etsm. 17 

atheism has been most active and confi- 
dent is the generation in which Christian 
theism has achieved its widest and swiftest 
conquests. Appeals to man's ignorance 
of what God was doing in the ages pre- 
vious to the beginning of this universe, 
and to his ignorance of how the Infinite 
One created what was not before, are 
about as effective blows against ** the most 
venerable and general of human beliefs," 
as would be an attempt to disprove the 
existence of Julius Caesar because we were 
not clearly informed concerning every 
part of his career, or as would be the 
denial that there are oxen and elephants 
in the world because science cannot ex- 
plain how grass enters the mouth of one 
animal and is transformed into an ox's 
hoof and into the mouth of another animal 
and is transformed into an elephant's tusk. 
Man is finite, and that his knowledge of 
the Eternal and Infinite God is limited 



18 3 Beltepe in ©ob* 

and shrouded by much of mystery, is what 
he has always confessed from the time of 
Job until now, and what the Christian be- 
lieves that God Himself has asserted in 
His revealed Word. This is also true of 
man's acquaintance with material things. 
But limited knowledge of God is not an 
argument against the Divine existence 
any more than our limited acquaintance 
with geology and astronomy disproves the 
existence of the palpable earth and the 
clear-shining stars. 

Whence arises the firm human faith in a 
Divine Person ? Is the Being of God a 
part of man's direct consciousness ? I am 
not careful to defend this position, but I 

confidently hold that there is that in the 

« 

human mind which either implies God or 
leads immediately to Him. Man has a 
self-evident knowledge of principles which 
are universal laws of thought. He per- 
ceives without proof that two parallel lines 



CI;e Strengtl? of tTIjeism. 19 

can never inclose a space. This is a 
self-evident truth. He perceives without 
proof that every effect must have a cause. 
These are universal laws of thought, true 
everywhere in all times, and they im- 
ply or presuppose that the universe is 
grounded in reason, and in this conviction 
is wrapped up the germ of theistic belief. 
Dr. Samuel Harris has said that ^^thc ex- 
istence of God, the absolute reason is a 
necessary prerequisite to the possibility 
of scientific human knowledge." Again, 
it is natural for the human mind to ask 
not only, Who made it ? but. What for ? 
Our children put this question daily, not 
only of things which we make and do, but' 
also of what are called works of Nature. 
Nature to the child's mind teaches the doc- 
trine of final causes, that is, Nature appears 
to harmonize with the conviction that 
whatever exists is for some end. There 
is a purpose running through creation. 



20 3 Beltcpe in (Sob. 

It was this antecedent conviction which 
led Harvey, Copernicus, and Kepler to 
their great scientific discoveries. And in 
this general conviction that everything is 
for some end, is wrapped up the thought 
of God, the Divine Purposer. What are 
called evidences or proofs of God's exist- 
ence are only the fervid sunbeams falling 
on the strong predispositions to belief 
that slumber in the human soul. Even 
the leader of modern agnosticism, Herbert 
Spencer, acknowledges that ^^ the assump*- 
tion of the existence of a first cause of 
the universe is a necessity of thought." 
And yet he pronounces this first cause 
unknown and unknowable. We must not, 
however, expect him to be consistent. 
As ex-President Hill has written, ^* Her- 
bert Spencer, refusing to assign attributes 
to the first cause, still expresses his faith 
in the truthfulness, faithfulness, wisdom, 
and beneficence of the order of Nature." 



CI?e Strength? of Cf?etsm* 21 

Manifestly, agnosticism is a hard and 
devious road for this blind giant to walk 
in. If the assumption of the existence of 
a first cause is a necessity of thought, and 
the order of Nature is uniform, wise, and 
good, then uniformity, wisdom, and good- 
ness would naturally seem to belong to 
the first cause. In this case he is not un- 
knowable. 

Atheism is wrecked when brought face 
to face with the chief facts of the universe. 
The first fact is Matter. Matter had a 
beginning, otherwise it is eternal. Why 
not hold that matter is eternal ? Let us 
first inquire. What is matter ? Chemical 
science reduces it to about seventy ele- 
ments. Let us suppose that these seventy 
elemental substances are eternal, self-ex- 
istent. Let us not ask at present how 
these seventy dead gods came into exist- 
ence, but let us grant their eternity. We 
are forced to inquire, '' Which is more 



22 3 Believe in (Sob. 

rational, the common belief of mankind 
in one Eternal, Spiritual Being, or this 
fanciful hypothesis of seventy eternal, 
material beings ? " And then we are 
forced to ask, *' How did these seventy 
stony, or metallic, or gassy gods, not hav- 
ing life, get the power to transform them- 
selves, not only into this earth, so crowded 
with marks of intelligence, so swarming 
with vitality, not only into the wheeling 
congregations of isolated worlds, but into 
such beings as we know ourselves to be?" 
The absurdity of maintaining the eternity 
of matter as an escape from the difficulty 
of believing in an eternal mind, is con- 
spicuous, and becomes even more so 
when, following the newest science, which 
teaches that the present universe is not 
eternal, that it had a beginning, we trace 
the world back to innumerable atoms, as 
the primordial elements out of which has 
sprung what we see and know. Are these 



CI?e Strengtt? of CI?etsm. 23 

molecules self-originated, self-existent ? 
Are we to sacrifice human faith in one God 
to this countless host of atomic gods ? The 
pitiable spectacle has been sometimes wit- 
nessed, of men's forsaking the faith in the 
Divine Spirit, who is eternal and unchange- 
able in His being, power, wisdom, holiness, 
justice, goodness, and truth, and bowing 
down in degrading fetich-worship at the 
shrine of the new polytheism, adorning in 
love-sick folly and crowning with garlands 
of rhetoric these deified atoms which Sir 
John Herschel instructs us have all the 
appearance of '' manufactured articles." 
Not content with the ** conclusion that 
* Hamlet * and * Paradise Lost ' are simply 
products of molecular motion, that the 
Iliad is only the result of the decomposi- 
tion of brain matter, or that the sublime 
strains of Isaiah and Habakkuk are merely 
a posturing of polarized atoms," — not con- 
tent with such outrageous folly, shall mod- 



24 3 Beliepe in (Sob. 

ern wisdom bestride the molecule and say, 
**Down, O God of Abraham and Moses 
and Newton ! I have found the ultimate 
somewhat that supersedes the Infinite 
Mind " ? This is truly the landing which 
an atheistic science has made on the 
shores of its wild speculation. It is plain 
that the reason can find no resting place 
in any theory of eternal matter, whether it 
thinks of seventy elements or of countless 
millions of primal germs ; for the old, per- 
sistent question, *'Who made these?" still 
arises, and thus we are driven into the 
arms of One who is independent, self-exist- 
ent, eternal. ** If all the world," says Janet, 
**is contingent, the cause must be abso- 
lute." If, following backward the changes 
in the visible universe, we finally reach 
that beginning which science now affirms, 
we must then repeat the ancient truth, 
" In the beginning God created the heaven 
and the earth." 



CI?e Strengtf} of Cl^eism. 25 

Another fact over which all forms of 
atheism hopelessly stumble, is the fact of 
intelligent order in the universe. Matter 
not only exists, but is arranged in count- 
less and marvelous adaptations. In- 
telligence is everywhere displayed. As 
Professor Fisher has written, *' To talk of 
thought without a thinker is to utter 
words without a meaning." In what I 
now say the argument from intelligence 
in the universe will be linked with the 
argument from causation. From the ob- 
servation of orderly phenomena, man in- 
fers a creating and governing intelligence. 
Nothing is more certain than that every- 
thing which begins to be has an adequate 
cause. The principle of causation which 
leads us inevitably toward God is at the 
foundation of scientific inquiry. The sci- 
entist may stop with the second causes, 
deeming these the proper limits of science ; 
but the mind never rests there, for the 



26 3 Beliepe in (Sob. 

principle of causation is never content 
until it reaches a first cause. This style 
of argument, from effect to cause, which 
is, as I have said, at the basis of science, 
and which to the great mass of men is 
entirely satisfactory, is also the Biblical 
style of reasoning, from the things that 
are made to the infinite power and God- 
hood of the Maker, from the human house 
built to the human house-builder, from 
the world-house built to the world-maker, 
God. '' We arc entitled, we are required," 
says Dr. Mc Cosh, ^* to trust and follow 
these principles." But Mr. Hume says 
that while it is proper for us, on seeing a 
watch, to argue a watch-maker, it is not 
allowable for us, on seeing the world, to 
argue a world-maker. Why ? — Because 
we have seen a watch made and have not 
seen a world made. But I am sure that a 
savage who has never seen a watch made, 
on finding one in the desert, would con- 



C{?e Strengtij of (El^etsm* 27 

elude at once that the machine had a con- 
triver, not because he ever saw one put 
together, but because he saw evidences 
that it had been put together. I never 
saw the world put together, but I see 
evidences that it has been put together. 
But evolution, we are told, displaces this 
carpenter theory of creation. The uni- 
verse was not put together, but grew like 
a seed. Quite possibly this is true. But 
evolution, which is only a law of growth, 
neither disproves a Divine Power at the 
root of growth, a Divine Purpose in the 
end of growth, nor a Divine Wisdom run- 
ning all through the process of growth. 
If evolution be true, then we have new 
and even stronger argument for the abid- 
ing activity of an Infinite Mind in all 
Nature. An acorn is more wonderful than 
a Corliss engine. In the acorn is wrapped 
up a tiny organism, not only exhibiting a 
multitude of adaptations to soil, air, and 



28 3 Beltere in ®ob. 

light, but also gifted with the power of 
reproducing itself and covering the earth, 
in the lapse of centuries, with forests of 
giant oaks. The Corliss engine wears out 
in time, and in it is no machinery for pro- 
ducing similar mechanisms which shall 
also construct others of like power, and so 
on without limit. A universe built like 
an engine or a house requires God ; but 
a universe which began as a seed or a 
multitude of seeds requires not only an 
Omnipotent Creator at the start, but also 
an ever-acting Divine Wisdom in the com- 
plex unfolding, the intricate and manifold 
adjustment and developments of Nature, 
through all the incomprehensible periods 
of the past and the perpetual wonder of 
the present. For evolution, it has been 
well said, ** gives not simply a new and 
truer doctrine of the Creator but a sub- 
limer and diviner doctrine of Providence." 
But it is objected, rather for the sake 



CI?e Strengtij of tEIjetsm, 29 

of argument than for the sake of truth, 
that if every effect must have an adequate 
cause, if contrivance implies a contriver, 
music a musician, design a designer, world- 
making a world-maker, then the world- 
maker himself is an effect. Back of him 
must be another creator, and so on in an 
infinite series. To this jugglery I answer, 
first, that the God to whom the argu- 
ments from design and causation lead us, 
does not exhibit any marks of contriv- 
ance. Nature appears to be arranged, 
built, *' gotten up." God does not soap- 
pear to human thought. Nature appears 
to be an effect. God does not appear to 
be an effect. Secondly, if one cause is 
sufficient to explain the result, it is un- 
reasonable to multiply causes. The ** in- 
finite series" folly needlessly multiplies 
causes. And thirdly, it leaves the uni- 
verse still unexplained. If there be an 
infinite chain of causes, we have here a 



30 3 Beltepe in (gob. 

stupendous effect which demands a stu- 
pendous cause. It has been truly said 
that the entire chain cannot hang upon 
nothing, and that an endless adjournment 
of causes is a process which is meaningless 
and useless, and in which reason can never 
acquiesce. 

The human mind is in endless protest 
against that mental suicide which leaves 
the stupendous effect which we behold 
about us without a cause. It is generally 
in endless war with any theory which 
demands that intelligence should be ex- 
plained by non-intelligence. The unper- 
verted mind of man is in sympathy with 
Napoleon on the Mediterranean ship-deck, 
as, pointing to the stars, he confuted and 
silenced the atheist generals about him. 
It is in sympathy with Lord Herbert, in 
pointing to the wonders of the human 
body as showing forth the skill of a Divine 
Creator. It is in sympathy with Chalmers, 



^I?e Sitcnc^il^ of tEl^etsm. 31 

in pointing to the marvels of the human 
eye, as a pregnant and luminous inscrip- 
tion of Divinity, fuller and plainer, as he 
believed, than '' can be gathered from a 
broad and magnificent survey of the skies, 
lighted up though they be with the glories 
and wonders of astronomy." And when, 
with the student who pries with his micro- 
scope into the cell-structures of plant and 
animal organization, the human mind looks 
as deeply as it is able into the hidden 
recesses of Nature, beholding a tiny, color- 
ess mass so minute that a hundred of 
equal dimensions would not cover the 
width of a razor's edge, and marks this 
little cell, precisely the same in oak and 
eagle and the human body, but neverthe- 
less weaving all the various tissues of 
structure, making now a violet and then 
a vulture, now a geranium and then a 
giraffe, now an elm and then an elephant, 
now a mollusk and then a man, it is awe- 



32 3 Beltepc in &ob. 

struck and worshipful, knowing that this 
little shuttle, so constantly busy in making 
the marvels of the universe, must have back 
of it the skilled hand of an Infinite and 
Ever Present God. 

There are other rocks which make ship- 
wreck of atheism and agnosticism, and which 
furnish new and still more striking proofs 
of the folly which would write '' No God " 
on the heavens above, which the Creator 
has starred with His name, and on the 
soul of man, which He has graven with the 
imperishable truths of personality and the 
moral law. But our present study has, I 
believe, shown us anew that the being of 
God is the chief fact of human knowledge, 
denying or attempting to discredit which, 
we find that all nature fights against us, 
as the stars in their courses fought against 
Sisera. It ought then to be evident to all 
that, since there is a Divine Power above 



Ct?e Strengtf} of tTtjeism. 33 

us and about us, He is the greatest con- 
cern of our lives. The chief end of man 
is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. 
This being true, can anything be more of 
an outrage to all that is noblest in human- 
ity than to make the chief concern of our 
lives a matter of irreverent jest ? Is there 
anything more shocking than to behold 
men standing, with conceited smirks on 
their faces and blasphemies issuing from 
their lips, in the presence of this burning 
bush of the universe wherein God dwell- 
eth } A human hyena, howling about the 
graves of Washington and Lincoln, is an 
object to be respected by the side of the 
impudent jackal who boldly drags the car- 
cass of his own folly and foulness into the 
Splendor of the Great White Throne. We 
are living in the hand of God the Creator. 
What spirit but that of reverence becomes 
the human soul ? When Daniel made 
3 



34 3 Beliepe in ©06. 

his accusation against Belshazzar, he re- 
proached him for his profane pride, and 
closed with the declaration, ** And the God 
in whose hand thy breath is and whose 
are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified." 



GoD's Three Revelations 
OF Himself. 



(Bob's Cl?ree 'Revelations of 
himself. 



*' TAe God that made the world and 
all things thereut^ He being Lord 
of heaven and earthy dwelleth not 
in temples made with hands; 
neither is he served by men'' s 
hands, as though he needed any- 
thing, seeing He himself giveth 
to all, life, and breath, and all 
things; and He made of one blood 
every nation of men for to dwell 
on all the face of the earthy hav- 
ing determined their appointed 
seasons^ and the bounds of their 
habitation; that they should seek 
God^ if haply they might feel 
after Him, and find Him, though 
he is not far fro7n each one of 
us : for in Him we live and move 
and have our being; as certain 
even of your own poets' /lave said, 
For we are also His offspring. 
Being then the offspring of God, 
we ought not to think that the 
Godhead is like unto gold, or sil- 
ver, or stone, graven by art and 

[37] 



^^ 3 Beltepe in ©06, 



device of man. The times of 
ignorance^ therefore^ God over- 
looked: but now He commandeth 
men that they should all every- 
where repent; inasmuch as He 
hath appointed a day, in the 
which he will judge the world 
in righteousness by the Man whom 
He hath ordained; whereof He 
hath given assurance unto all 
men in that He hath raised Him 
from the dead. " — Acts i'/: 24-ji. 



THIS passage is taken from Paul's ser- 
mon on Mars' Hill, before the curious 
Athenian philosophers, among whom re- 
ligion had apparently reached the begin- 
ning of the agnostic stage. The truths 
which the Apostle so skillfully and boldly 
proclaimed, sweep nearly the entire range 
of theistic argument. With the mission- 
ary's assurance and ardor, and with an an- 
cient orator's consummate tact he brought 
home his message. God's revelation in 
Nature as the Creator of the worlds ; His 
revelation in man, who is God's child ; His 



(Sob's ^f?ree Hcpelattons of fjtmself. 39 

revelation in His Son, our Lord, by whom 
the world is to be judged, and the crowning 
assurance of His self-disclosure which comes 
to us through Jesus Christ by His resur- 
rection from the dead, — this is the outline 
of the most famous utterance ever spoken 
by man, and will indicate the current of 
our thoughts in this discourse. 

I have already shown that agnosticism 
is an attack on the trustworthiness of the 
human faculties, that it logically destroys 
the ground on which all belief rests. I 
have shown that the Spirit which says, 
*' I do not know," is as foolish as that 
which says, *' I deny," when the question 
of doubt and denial concerns God. I have 
shown that the evidences for the Divine 
existence are rays of light falling on 
germs of theistic belief already in the 
mind. As Professor Shedd has written : 
**The strenuous endeavor of atheism to 
prove there is no God, proves that there 



40 3 Beliepe in 6ob, 

IS one. For if the Deity were really a 
nonentity like a grififin, . . . there would 
be no effort to invalidate it, but the same 
utter indifference respecting the idea of 
God would prevail among mankind as re- 
specting the idea of a grififin." I have 
shown that atheism and agnosticism are 
hopelessly wrecked by the two facts — the 
facts of matter and of intelligent order in 
the universe — and that we are driven to 
the arms of Him whom Paul preached on 
Mars' Hill, the God who made the world 
and all things therein. 

Of the facts in God's revelation of Him- 
self in the natural world, I shall now speak 
of only one, the fact of motion. If thd 
spiritual origin of matter be demanded by 
our reason, equally does reason require 
that motion be explained by the activity 
of spirit. If, with Professor Grove and the 
physicists, we call motion one of the affec- 
tions of matter, and discern in matter a 



A 



®o6'5 Ct?ree Hepelattons of f^tmself. 41 

manipulation of force, we are equally com- 
pelled to seek the explanation of force in 
an intelligent will. ** The conception of 
force," as Dr. Whewell says, ^* involves the 
idea of cause/* Motion, which implies 
moving power, and which comes to our 
thought in such various forms as heat, 
electricity, light, magnetism, chemical 
affinity, gravity, vital force in plants, vital 
force in animals, is a chief phenomenon of 
the universe. Everything we behold is in 
motion. An object may be relatively at 
rest, as for example, a building, or some 
person in it, but building and person are 
resting on a body called the earth that 
is whirling eastward a thousand miles an 
hour. The motions of the universe are 
orderly, mathematical. The forces we know 
are regulated, in the sense of being in ac- 
cord with discoverable law. They are 
also connected, so that one force has its 
equivalent in others. They are inter- 



42 3 Beltepe in &ob. 

changeable. Heat may be transformed 
into electricity, and electricity into vital 
force. They are connected with anterior 
forces and are perpetuated in new move- 
ments. Thus there is a unity in force, 
necessitating the thought of one creating 
and upholding Power. All motions which 
we know, are in accordance with certain 
laws, but law is only a method of motion 
and is not the source of motion. Law 
points to a law-maker and an executive, 
and since intelligence is in the law, it must 
inhere in Him who ordained it. 

When we think of these so-called forces 
at work about us, gravity drawing all 
worlds toward each other, vegetable forces 
which lift the gigantic pines on Norwegian 
or Californian hills as high as the lofty 
cathedral spires, the immeasurable poten- 
cies of light and heat, and then learn that 
they have been reduced by science to one 
force, and that philosophic science is com- 



®o6's ^f?ree Kepclattons of ^imself, 43 

mitted to the truth that force has a spir- 
itual origin ; when we remember that uni- 
versal life is a correlated series of motions, 
orderly, harmonious, unified, we stand in 
the luminous center of theistic belief, and 
the thought of God is as inevitable as 
is the thought of Handel when we are list- 
ening to the majestic, on-sweeping, multi- 
tudinous and yet unified harmonies of his 
greatest oratorio. The universe, when 
seen through the lens of this truth, that 
these manifold forces of Nature working 
in an intelligible harmony must have a 
spiritual origin, becomes an impressive 
revelation of God. We begin to read the 
alphabet of His omnipotence. A child's 
imagination is awed by the power of fabled 
giants, but the forces of Nature make hu- 
man might, though it should equal that 
of Milton's warring angels in Heaven, 
seem puerile. What are all the powers 
of mankind compared with the force of 



44 3 Beliere in (gob. 

the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which not 
only uplifted and overthrew a city, mak- 
ing the solid earth .undulate like the waves 
of the sea, but raised all Europe, from 
Portugal to the Highlands of Scotland, and 
upheaved the Atlantic from the straits of 
Gibraltar to the far-off American shores? 
This is the force of gas and fire and water and 
steam, God's own energy working through 
second causes, in terrestrial ways. But, 
inconceivable though such might is, it is 
nothing to the celestial displays of Divine 
Power. What pride would fill the heart 
of fnan if he should be able to build a 
railroad track about the earth, bridging 
the wide oceans, and if, on a gigantic train, 
he should be able to pile the Himalayas, 
the Andes, and the Rocky Mountains, 
which should be transported from conti- 
nent to continent around the earth in one 
hour, with machinery so perfect in con- 
struction and adjustment that there should 



&ob's Cl?ree HcDcIations of ^imself. 45 

be no noise or slightest jar, and so endur- 
ing that the colossal train might continue 
its rapid journey without a break, round 
and round our globe, unwearied for a 
thousand centuries. Even then the forces 
wielded in this Herculean labor would be 
Divine, though the machinery might be of 
human contrivance.. But what is all this 
to that which God is daily doing ? The 
Andes, Himalayas, and Rocky Mountains 
are so small on a raised globe that their 
altitudes are scarcely perceptible, while 
the earth itself, with these tiny wrinkles 
on the surface, turning on its mild axle so 
smoothly that the sick man's slumbers are 
not disturbed thereby, is whirled about 
the sun at the rate of nineteen thousand 
miles an hour, and kept in its ethereal 
grooves without variation or shadow of 
turning during the long, weary cycles in 
which human empires rise and fall. But 
our earth is a pigmy by the side of Jupiter, 



46 3 Beltere in (Sob* 

who moves about the solar center at a still 
greater speed, and the sun himself, com- 
pared with whom our earth is but a cinder 
of coal in the mouth of a burning volcano, 
is whirling at the rate of three thousand 
miles a minute about some vaster sun, 
while the multitude of suns peopling the 
Milky Way are speeding about some enor- 
mous center with the same inconceivable 
velocity. And when we remember that 
in order to preserve these mighty spheres 
in balance, two opposing forces, one of 
which would fling them off into space and 
the other of which would draw them to 
some greater body, need to be perfectly 
adjusted ; when we remember that all 
worlds are upheld, not by keeping them 
at rest, but by harmonizing their vast and 
complex motions, we are impelled to cry 
out, ** The Lord God Omnipotent reign- 
eth ! " And as man's pride of power is 
broken in the presence of the daily round 



(Sob's CI)ree Hcpelattons of fjtmself, 47 

of the universe, he will repeat the question 
of that profound poet of the early dawn of 
the world, who, like all the great seers of 
our race, found God in Nature and her 
majestic movements : *' Canst thou bind 
the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose 
the bands of Orion ? Canst thou bring 
forth the Twelve Signs in their season, or 
canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" 
But however luminous and suggestive 
the disclosures of God which come to us 
from without, they are pale before the 
effulgent light which burns in our own 
souls. Effectually barring the progress 
of atheism and agnosticism is the fact of 
the human mind, with its consciousness, 
self-determination, freedom, multiplied in- 
tellectual powers, moral convictions, and 
religious ideas and emotions. Man is the 
stumbling-block of modern materialism. 
He is also the rock and fortress of theism. 
God becomes real to us through ourselves. 



48 3 Beltepe in ©ob. 

Coming to a knowledge of our own per- 
sonality, we arrive at a knowledge of the 
Divine personality. The fundamental fact 
in the whole structure of our knowledge 
is consciousness. You are, and know that 
you are. You are yourself and not an- 
other. You are a mind having capabili- 
ties many, emotions various and mighty. 
You are a will with self-determination and 
freedom. You have not always been. 
You know your dependence. You know 
your moral responsibility. You are in the 
grasp of something which imperatively 
demands that you act righteously ; and 
you are equally in the grasp of a reason 
which demands that you be explained as 
an effect. If there is intelligence in you, 
there must be intelligence in your Creator ; 
otherwise the effect would contain ele- 
ments not involved in the cause ; and this 
remains true whether you date your crea- 
tion back twenty, sixty, or unnumbered 



(gob's CI?ree Kcpelations of ^tmself. 49 

millions of years. If there is personal- 
ity in you, there must be personality in 
Him who made you. If there is a moral 
law at work in your soul, the Creator must 
be the moral law-giver. The Cilician poet 
whom Paul quoted on Mars' Hill expressed 
the truth which we must come to believe 
when we know ourselves : ** We also are 
His offspring." 

Materialism breaks down utterly in the 
attempt to show that man is the son of an 
atom and not the son of the Lord God 
Almighty. Even Herbert Spencer's chief 
apostle in America, John Fiske of Cam- 
bridge, acknowledges that " the progress 
of modern discovery, so far from bridging 
over the chasm between mind and matter, 
tends rather to exhibit the distinction 
between them as absolute." But the task 
given to materialism is not only to show 
that the forces of Nature and the princi- 
ples of life are deduced from matter, but 
4 



50 3 Beltepe in ©ob. 

that the soul with its faculties, that all 
ideas, that the moral law, that man's con- 
sciousness of God, are all products of 
matter or deductions from it. Says Dr. 
Henry B. Smith, ** If materialism fails to 
deduce any of these things from matter, 
the entire system fails." Man is a con- 
scious spirit, standing on the summit- of 
creation, surveying the earth and subduing 
it, entering into her secret chambers with 
the torch of investigation, and employing 
her riches for ends which are spiritual. 
Does he himself belong to an order that 
is material, mechanical, fatalistic ? Every 
emancipated, unperverted soul holds him- 
self as of another and higher range of 
being than material forms and forces. 
While in Nature he holds himself as super- 
natural in the sense of being above the 
material order, and when his mind is ex- 
alted, he reverences his own **onlooking 
and inestimable spirit, beside which the 
stars are painted dust." 



(Sob's ^Ijree Hepelattons of ^tmself, 51 

We cannot think of ourselves without 
thinking of God. Hence, as one of the 
profoundest philosophers of America has 
written: ''No idea so impresses universal 
man as the idea of a God. Neither space 
nor time, neither life nor death, not sun, 
moon, or stars, so influence the immediate 
consciousness of man in every clime, in all 
generations, as does that Presence which 
in Wordsworth's phrase is not to be put 
by. This idea overhangs human existence 
like a firmament, and though clouds and 
darkness obscure it in many zones, while 
in others it is crystalline and clear, all 
human beings must live beneath it, and 
cannot possibly get from under its all- 
embracing arch." Atheism has rightly 
been called an insult to humanity. Man 
is conscious of reason and of obligation to 
do right ; and if reason and righteousness 
do not rule in the universe, then he must 
either exalt himself as a god, which his 
own sense of dependence and unworthi- 



52 3 Beliepe in ©ob* 

ness forbids, or else he must distrust his 
own consciousness, and be landed in utter 
skepticism. He will do neither. 

I remember the reverent emotions with 
which I walked through the splendid Mu- 
seum of Natural History which bears the 
great name of its founder, Agassiz. There 
I saw the world in miniature, the curious 
wonders of sea and land, the treasures of 
all the deeps, of all the continents, and 
gradually a sense of awe crept into my 
soul, as if I had been admitted by special 
favor into the laboratory of the Almighty. 
And then I marked how these million 
specimens of Divine thought had been 
arranged, each room representing one di- 
vision or subdivision of the Kingdom of 
Nature, each alcove exhibiting an infinite 
care and patience in the details of its 
assortment ; and as I wandered on, I saw 
how wonderfully the great naturalist 
had classified his treasures, so that each 



(Sob's CI?ree Kepelations of ^tmself. 53 

department was the vestibule to new and 
nobler products of the Divine workman- 
ship. And then I thought of the compre- 
hensive mind which had gathered and 
studied and placed these corals and shells 
and birds and creeping things and four- 
footed beasts which had haunted the icy- 
shores of Labrador and the tropic vegeta- 
tion of the Amazon, that mind which had 
discovered in the works of Nature many 
infallible proofs of a Divine Wisdom. And 
I thought of the great heart which had 
lovingly and patiently brooded over this 
superb display of the marvels of earth, 
the gathering of which was the chief labor 
of his life ; so that, although thinking of 
the Museum, I felt myself to be in a tem- 
ple where Aristotle, and Bacon, and New- 
ton, and Cuvier, and Faraday would have 
worshiped God, nevertheless, thinking of 
Agassiz himself, I believed myself to be 
in a sanctuary where David and Plato and 



54 3 Beltepe in ®ob. 

the highest souls of all times would have 
seen the brightest inscriptions of the Eter- 
nal Spirit. 

But to know man in his grandeur we 
must stand in other fanes besides those of 
science. There is the world-wide temple 
of the imagination, carpeted with blossoms 
of beauty and overhung with the stars of 
truth and love. There I see the Brahman 
poets singing their Vedic hymns. There 
I see Homer, 

"The blind bard who on the Chian strand, 

By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, 

Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey, 

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea," 

and whose resounding lines beat like war- 
drums and thrill like the trumpet's ardors 
after eighty generations. There I see 
Dante, dwelling by faith in a supernatural 
world and making it more real to his 
nation than the geography of the Italian 



®ob's Cf?ree HcDelattons of fjtmself. 55 

peninsula. There I see Shakespeare, 
whose imaginary personages are more 
vivid to our minds than the neighbors 
across the way. There is Wordsworth, 
feeling in his soul the pressure of that un- 
seen Spirit whose dwelling is everywhere, 
and by his cheerful insight and magic 
interpretations of Nature, lifting a genera- 
tion to serener hights. There is Emerson 
questioning the rhodora, 

'* Whose purple petals fallen in the pool 
Made the black waters with their beauty gay," 

and believing that the same power which 
evoked the blossom called to it the poet- 
worshiper. Standing in such a temple, 
does atheism, does agnostic materialism, 
find in atoms, or blind molecular forces, the 
explanation of these radiant, far-seeing fac- 
ulties that have woven a golden web of 
beauty and of music over earth and sky, 
and starred them with the name of God ? 



56 3 Beltepe in ©ob. 

Has mole-eyed unbelief convicted of folly 
these angelic spirits who sang with the 
consciousness of the Eternal Spirit brood- 
ing over their souls ? 

It is surely not needful to contemplate 
further the impotence of a materialistic 
philosophy to account for man. It has 
never explained how matter could rise 
into self-consciousness, or into love. It 
has never begun to explain the birth of 
the moral sense. It simply commits sui- 
cide when it attempts to resolve into ' 
molecular equivalents the great righteous 
acts and moral sublimities of history, the 
courage of Martin Luther, the patriotism 
of Washington, the ardent unselfishness 
with which Wendell Phillips cast all his 
ambitions behind him to help the slave, 
the serene self-sacrifice of the American 
captain who, while the iron ship was sink- 
ing, and only one could escape from the 
hold of death, calmly gave that chance to 



©ob's tEtjree Kepelattons of ^tmself. 57 

another. These acts belong to a sphere 
which materialism can no more reach than 
it can destroy man's faith in the Divine 
righteousness which rules in conscience. 
But there is one other temple greater than 
all the rest, on entering which we dis- 
cover as nowhere else the impertinence 
of atheism and the glory of humanity. It 
is the temple of Religion. Men have lived 
with the sense of God supreme in their 
souls, a passion in their hearts. He has 
been to them the one fact and crowning 
reality of life. Can atheism, armed with 
the microscope, and prying for a thousand 
years, find in the atomic particles a 
rational explanation of that faith in a 
friendly God which led Abraham away 
from home and country and kindred into 
a new land, and which so wrought in his 
soul and life that he by it was enabled to 
open in history that new order of things 
which controls human civilization to-day .-^ 



58 3 Beltcpe in ©ob. 

What has agnostic materialism to say in 
accounting for the life of Moses who, ** see- 
ing the invisible," bore the mightiest bur- 
dens ever laid on human shoulders ? Can 
it find latent in the stone-dust or in the 
rocky foundations of Mars' Hill the invinci- 
ble spirit with which the Apostle Paul 
proclaimed his faith in Him in whom we 
live, and move, and have our being? 
Have the devout minds of the ages been 
deluded when they, in communion with 
God, have risen to holy ecstasy or poured 
out their souls in rhythmic aspiration ? 
What mean the raptures of Christian faith 
in dying hours ? 

** He lifts me to the golden doors ; 

The flashes come and go, 
All heaven bursts her starry floors 

And strews her lights below, 
And deepens on and up ! The gates 

Roll back, and far within 



(Sob's trijree Herelattons of ^tmself. 59 

For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, 

To make me pure of sin. 
The sabbaths of eternity — 

One sabbath deep and wide — 
A Hght upon the shining sea — 

The Bridegroom with His Bride ! " 

What mean these devout aspirations ? 
Are they the twitching of diseased nerves, 
resulting from the anger of misplaced 
molecules ? What account can material- 
istic unbelief give of man as he appears in 
the temple of worship? — None that ex- 
plains him ; none that is not a monstrous 
absurdity, requiring of us a savage credul- 
ity more debasing than fetich-worship. 
And as we perceive the frantic folly to 
which men have been driven to escape 
from God, we shall more serenely repose 
in the faith that '' each human mind must 
rest on a mind sympathetic, creative, and 
eternally young." 



60 3 Beltcpe in (gob. 

It is with a heart hushed with awe that 
I bring before you now the fifth and final 
fact which shatters atheism and agnosti- 
cism. I mean the person of Christ. A 
theory may be considered as a frame. 
A fact is a picture. If the picture is too 
large for the frame, the frame must be cast 
aside. We have found Nature too large 
for the theory of atheism. We have found 
man altogether too large. But when we 
bring to this frame the picture of man at 
his highest, the man Christ Jesus, we find 
ourselves endeavoring to inclose the ocean 
in a wine-glass and compress the stars into 
a crucible. Atheistic materialism, which 
must account for Jesus Christ as well as 
for other men, is compelled to pervert 
history and reason to bring Him to the 
common level, and, having done this, 
stumbles over His humanity as hopelessly 
as over the humanity of ordinary men. 
But taking Jesus for what the greatest 



®o6's d?ree Hepelattons of f^tmself. 61 

unbelievers have regarded Him, ''the in- 
comparable man, the matchless flower of 
our race," how shall we regard His testi- 
mony to the Divine Father ? Shall wc 
receive Newton's testimony with regard 
to gravity, Faraday's testimony with re- 
gard to electricity. Sir Lionel Beale's testi- 
mony with regard to cell-structure, and 
reject Christ's testimony with regard to 
the primal fact of religion, the existence 
and nature of God ? Has not this Man an 
unquestionable right to speak with author- 
ity on this one theme ? Has not the ag- 
nostic been rightly described as one who 
disbelieves the testimony of Jesus regard- 
ing God ? And when Christ assures us 
that by doing the Father's will we shall 
know of the doctrine, when He gives each 
one a practical test of these great things 
of the Spirit, is He not to be believed ? 
Has not His testimony received innumer- 
able confirmations ? Is it not a fact that 



62 3 Beltepe in &ob. 

multitudes of men, bewildered by Nature 
and speculations about Nature, and blinded 
by sin, have been brought to know Jesus 
Christ, and have walked out into the light 
of Christian faith where God has been the 
chief moving and moulding force of their 
lives ? 

But when we regard the person of Christ 
without prejudgments against the super- 
natural, we find Him refusing to come 
within the categories of a sensuous phil- 
osophy, or to be explained by the laws of 
human heredity. We find in Him a spir- 
itual originality which made Him lonely 
in the age when He lived — a ** sweetness 
and light" that were not embittered into 
cynicism toward man, or darkened into 
distrust toward God ; a self-assertion that 
would be madness were it not supported 
by a wisdom and holiness unparalleled, and 
withal a self-sacrifice that has bound the 
Christian generations to the foot of His 



(Sob's Cfjree Kepelattons of fjimself. 63 

Cross. Failing to find any mark of sin in 
His life or any defect in His all-sided 
virtue, we perceive Him standing before us 
as the miracle of history, and we do not 
wonder at the spiritual force which from 
Him has rolled like an ocean-tide down the 
years, breaking in blessing on the shores 
of all the continents to-day. We do not 
wonder that the wisest of our race have 
seen in Him the brightness of a heavenly 
glory and the express image of the Divine 
Person, and, beholding Him, have rejoiced 
in the Father's love revealed in Him for 
our redemption. We do not look down- 
ward into the primitive particles of matter 
for the origin of that moral glory which 
illumined Palestine and is making the 
whole earth a Holy Land. We do not 
find in the atheist's dreams of development 
from atoms the faintest or remotest possi- 
bility of any explanation gf that love and 
tenderness which transfigured the tragedy 



64 3 Believe in ©ob* 

of Calvary. Not from beneath — an evolu- 
tion from matter — but from above, a reve- 
lation from God and of God, this is the 
explanation of Christ to which we are 
driven. Something divine entered hu- 
manity in Jesus. His word is the final law 
of the Spirit. The God He revealed is 
love, and through Him God becomes to us 
a power unto salvation. It was but natu- 
ral that such a Saviour, with such a disclos- 
ure, should prove himself lord over the 
material world, using it to confirm his 
doctrine. It was but natural that a 
God of love, purposing to join together 
forever redemption from sin with the 
revelation of man's immortality, should 
have given assurance of His great intent 
in the resurrection of Christ from the 
dead. 

On every Lord's day we celebrate in 
jubilant hymns the Redeemer's rising from 
the tomb, whereby he is declared to be the 



(Sob's Ct?ree Hepelattons of ^tmself* 65 

Son of God with power. Something hap- 
pened, as one has said, in far-off Judea, on 
the third day after Jesus' death — some- 
thing happened, which changed the world. 
This is a fact which unbelief cannot ex- 
plain away. By this open tomb we see 
our God, as He is not revealed in the star- 
strewn and moving heavens, or in the 
powers of our own minds, or in the 
smitings of conscience. We see Him as a 
God — not of might merely, and wisdom, 
and holy law, but as God, our Friend and 
Saviour, bringing to us, like the sunshine 
of April, which ''startles with crocuses the 
sullen earth," the warmth of heavenly love 
and hope. In the risen Christ He becomes 
to us the conqueror of sin and death. 
Therefore we walk out of the shadows of 
denial and doubt in which we may have 
lingered, and pour forth our gladdest 
hymns. Abiding with the risen Lord, 
atheism, with all its nightmare horrors, 
5 



66 3 BeltcDe in (gob. 

is a forgotten dream. '' And may the 
God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Fa- 
ther of glory, give unto us the spirit of 
wisdom in the knowledge of Him, the eyes 
of our understanding being enlightened : 
that we may know what is the hope of our 
calling and what the riches of the glory of 
His inheritance in the saints, and what is 
the exceeding greatness of His power to 
those who believe, according to the work- 
ing of His mighty power, which He wrought 
in Christ when He raised Him from the 
dead." 



Ct?e eternity of (5ob. 



Ct?c (Eternity of (5o6. 

*' From everlasting to everlasting thou 
art God.'''' — Ps. go : 2. 

• • • 

THESE are words from the Psalm of 
Mos^s, and they express that view of 
the nature of God which was given to the 
Hebrew reader in the mysterious name 
Jehovah. From the burning bush at Horeb 
the Lord revealed Himself to Moses as the 
'*IAm, the Existing One, the Eternal." 
The word Jehovah, is regarded as meaning 
'* the Living " or '' Self-Existent." It was a 
sacred word with the Hebrews, never pro- 
nounced, and expresses that aspect of the 
divine nature on which reverence and awe 
most easily fasten. The sublime concep- 
tion of a God, the dwelling-place of His 
people in all generations, to whom a thou- 

[69] 



70 3 Beltcpe in ®o6, 

sand years are but as a watch in the night, 
existent in absolute perfection before the 
mountain ridge§ were lifted, or the world's 
foundations laid, a God before whose date- 
less antiquity the life of man is as grass 
growing up in the morning, and in the 
evening cut down by the mower's scythe, 
this sublime conception was the refuge and 
rock of Israel, and is a part of Israel's 
legacy to the Christian mind of every age. 
God's eternity is thus seen to be a very 
ancient and familiar thought, but in the 
heart of all old truth is a vast realm of 
new truth awaiting exploration. Since we 
use language so thoughtlessly, since we 
daily pronounce words that are weighted 
with infinite meaning, mindless of their 
significance ; since, even in prayer, we are 
habitually employing phrases about God 
without ever having pondered them, it will 
be wise for us to contemplate the old He- 
brew doctrine that God is eternal, a doc- 



^t?e (EternttY of ®o6. 71 

trine associated in the New Testament 
with the nature of Christ, who is declared 
to be *^the same, yesterday, to-day, and 
forever;" and who said of Himself, ** Be- 
fore Abraham was I am." I propose then 
as our theme of meditation, ** The Eternity 
of God, the Proof and Moral Uses of the 
Doctrine." From the Scriptural represen- 
tations, it is manifest that God's existence 
is different in its mode from our own. ** I 
Am," not ''I have been," or ''I shall be," is 
His wonderful name. 

Thus we are carried to the edge of that 
insoluble mystery, so inspiring in its sub- 
lime lifting of our thoughts above ourselves, 
that there is with God a mode of being 
entirely different from our own ; that all 
that is, or has been, or will be, is a part 
of His serene and ever-present conscious- 
ness ; that God is to what we call time 
that which He is to space ; that He who 
inhabits immensity, also and equally in- 



72 3 Beltepe in ©06. 

habits eternity. Think for a moment of 
space. The mind sees it, and knows that if 
there were nothing else in the universe 
space would be left. The mind perceives 
that space extends indefinitely in all di- 
rections, that the imagination can put no 
Chinese wall about it, since infinite space 
lies beyond every inclosure which the 
mind can construct. The enormous dis- 
tances in our solar system are but a finger's 
breadth in that universe which the tele- 
scope has already disclosed. But God fill- 
eth it all. Now transfer this to time. We 
know of time only by a succession of cycles 
or events, that is, by motions in space. 
But God is to time what He is to space. 
He filleth it all. That is. He is the hab- 
itant of a realm of changeless existence, 
what the Scriptures call eternity. To Him 
there is no past or future such as ours, no 
mutation of being, no learning or forget- 
ting, but from everlasting to everlasting, a 



CI?e Stermty of ©ob. 73 

continuous, and abiding, and perfect self- 
possession — a being without possibility of 
beginning or ending, '' infinitely excelling 
all bounds of duration," because Himself 
absolute, free from limitations, independ- 
ent of time. Is not this the greatest 
thought that ever transfixed and trans- 
figured the mind of man ? With us time 
is either past, present, or future. The 
years come and go. But the living God, 
the '' I Am " of Moses, dwelleth in an 
** eternal now," — all that has been, is, or 
will be, the perpetual and abiding posses- 
sion of His infinite Mind, being known to 
Him truly — that is, in their relations to 
each other as first, midst, or last — in that 
realm of time of which we are subjects, but 
equally known to His changeless intelli- 
gence. But as creatures we can but think 
of God as existing in space and time, and 
subjecting Himself to our limitations. The 
Scriptures hint at the Divine reach of be- 



74 3 Believe in ®o6. 

ing ; and Philosophy has afifirmed it, as 
differing from ours in that it is absolved 
from temporal conditions. But, as created 
beings, we can conceive of God only as re- 
lated to us, with succession of thought and 
activity, so that we shall sum up all that can 
be clearly revealed to us of God's eternity, 
when we declare of it that it includes these 
three truths, that God now is, that He has 
ever been, and that He ever will be. The 
sublime words of Moses give us the full 
truth. ^*Thou art God," God exists; 
*'from everlasting thou art God," God has 
always existed ; ''to everlasting Thou art 
God," God will exist forever. 

First, then, God is. This is the chief 
fact of human knowledge. Men are so 
predisposed to believe in God that the first 
evidences of his being are sufficient to pro- 
duce the conviction of His existence. It is 
certain that men generally have recognized 
that they are intimately connected by 



Cfje (Eternity of <0o6. 75 

spiritual blood with the Author of all 
things ; that hence they are bound to wor- 
ship and to please Him, and that without His 
favor they are plunged into despair. In 
view of what is observed in the world of 
mind and the world of Nature, men have 
been convinced of their origin in a supreme 
power, their need of a supreme love, and 
their peril before the supreme Author of 
the moral law within. The human mind, in 
its natural working, is strongly theistic. 
You sit down by a piano, and some friend 
with long-practiced fingers renders for you 
a rhapsody of Liszt or song of Mendels- 
sohn, and you look on and listen in de- 
lighted astonishment, amazed at the sweet 
or intricate harmonies which the composer 
has written, and at the manual dexterity 
which throws them off lightly from the 
piano keys, and you will not for one mo- 
ment believe that all those marvelous 
combinations of musical sounds were the 



76 3 Beltepe in ®ob. 

chance thrummings of an idiot. You lie 
on the rocks by the Atlantic Coast and see 
the foaming billows following each other 
to the shore with mathematic march and 
precision ; you listen to the musical sob- 
bing of the waves sliding up the strand, 
and remember that the pallid moon and 
the glowing sun by their weight and heat 
lift the ocean up and down, ruffling his 
glistening mane till he roars with a voice 
which is heard by the capes and promon- 
tories of every zone ; you listen to the 
moaning wind sweeping over the sea, bring- 
ing health and freshness from the Arctic 
region which sends its cooling tides and 
breezes along the North Atlantic shore ; 
and then you turn from the sea, and gaze 
into some tiny salt pool in a hollow of the 
rocks, a home of life and beauty, with green 
mosses stretching their fairy arms over the 
barnacles that open their eager mouths to 
take the food which Nature has provided, 



Cf?e (EternttY of (Sob. 77 

the whole scene a picture which no human 
painter can approach ; and, as you listen 
and gaze, no prattler of atheism will vent- 
ure to tell you amid such surroundings that 
there is no wise Thinker in the universe, 
no heavenly Musician, no Celestial Artist, 
no Omnipotent Ruler, but you will rather 
give heed to the voice of the Hebrew 
Psalmist and say with him, ''The sea is 
His and He made it, and His hand formed 
the dry land." 

Some of us have looked at that white 
marble wonder, the Cathedral of Milan. 
We have stood beneath its spacious 
arches ; have walked about its carved 
pediments ; have gazed with delight at its 
hundreds of pinnacles and thousands of 
statues ; have wandered over the roof, a 
tropic flower-garden of sculptured stone, 
and, from the central spire, have looked 
down on the whole beautiful pile at our 
feet, instinct with thought and devotion, a 



78 3 Beltcpe in 606. 

priceless jewel on the brow of the Queen 
of Lombardy, and no one could persuade 
us that all this strength and splendor of 
architecture sprang from a volcanic ex- 
plosion in the marble quarries of Carrara. 
Such skepticism is not launched at the 
petty cathedrals which man has builded, 
and very rarely at this majestic cathedral 
of God, this pillared and pinnacled Cosmos 
of beauty and power, whose music is the 
chant of morning stars. 

Secondly, in the doctrine of God's Eter- 
nity is contained the truth that God ever 
has been. This follows necessarily from 
the first statement that God is, or in other 
words, that a First Cause exists. If God 
is the First Cause of all that is, then He 
is without beginning. If He began to be, 
then he were not first. That which is a 
First Cause is uncaused. There is nothing 
back of a First. That which is first must 
be from eternity. If there ever were a 



CI?e €ternttY of (Sob. 79 

time when God was not, there is no God 
now. He never could have come into be- 
ing, for there was nothing to cause His 
existence. God's life, then, never had a 
beginning. By searching we cannot find 
a period before which God was not. The 
mind will in vain weary itself in the effort, 
and yet an effort may give us a more ade- 
quate conception of the word eternal as 
applied to the life of God. A minute, if 
passed in pain, or even in silence, is long 
An hour seems to us an age, if passed in 
dread. A week of sorrow drags very 
slowly to its death. A year crowded with 
events is so long a period that, if we were 
carried to its beginning, we might hardly 
know ourselves. But go back in thought 
to the time before the Civil War, and you 
are almost in antiquity. 

Fifty years ago, many of us were not 
born, many were in their cradles, and 
those who were men and women grown, 



80 3 Beltcre in ©06. 

were reading Webster's speeches in the 
Senate. Fifty years ago is a remote 
epoch. But there are some now living 
who remember a period still more remote. 
Eighty years ago there was no railroad, or 
steamship, or telegraph, and the West was 
almost an unpeopled solitude. But stand 
in the entrance of the old South Church 
in Boston, and think back more than a 
hundred and fifty years to the day when, 
at the dedication of this building on the 
site of an older structure, the pastor, Mr. 
Sewall, gave out the prophetic text : ** And 
the glory of the latter house shall be 
greater than the glory of the former, saith 
the Lord of hosts ! " But God was then 
the dwelling place of His people, even as 
now. Cross the Atlantic, stand in West- 
minster Hall in London, and number the 
kings there crowned, before La Salle first 
sailed the waters of Lake Michigan, '' be- 
fore the acorn fell which grew into a keel" 



CI?e €ternttY of ©ob. 81 

for the Mayflower. But God was the 
dwelling place of His people, then as now. 
Go to Jerusalem, enter the Holy Sepulcher, 
lay your hand on the stone of unction 
which was kissed by holy lips that grew 
cold in death before the English nation 
and the English language were born, yes, 
a thousand years before Columbus turned 
his prow toward the New World. But 
leaving the Sepulcher, you may lay your 
hands on the ruins of a temple reared a 
thousand years before Jesus walked in 
Jerusalem. Or, you may stand by the 
Great Pyramid of Egypt, and gaze at a 
monument which was finished before Ab- 
raham crossed the Euphrates, aye, two 
thousand years before Romulus laid the 
foundation of Rome. But God was then 
the dwelling place of His people, as now. 
Go back to the morning of history. Walk 
with Adam in Paradise, and then, in- 
structed by modern knowledge, let your 



82 3 Beliepe in ®ob. 

mind retire into those far-distant ages, 
millions of years ago, when this world was 
formless and empty, floating as a part of 
the fire-mist, and you have not reached 
the cradle or the birth-hour of God. 

And when we have heard and heeded 
the voice of science declaring that these 
cycles of life, of which we are a part, were 
preceded by others enduring through mil- 
lions of ages, and these by others equally 
vast, through whose numberless centuries 
worlds slowly came into being, planets 
emerged from nebulous vapors, and heat 
and ice worked their miracles in upheaving 
continents, and grinding the rocky prom- 
ontories into the soils out of which van- 
ished forms of organized life were builded ; 
when we remember that all the incalculable 
periods which geology and astronomy dis- 
close, with vast suns waning slowly through 
epochs innumerable, are but an instant to 
the aeons that preceded them, a moment'^ 



^Ije €ternitY of (Sob 83 

ripple of life beside the oceanic expanses 
of infinitude, an insect's flutter and gleam 
after sidereal ages and cycles of ages, roll- 
ing back into the immensities of time, even 
then we have not reached the beginning of 
God, of whom Moses said, '' He is from 
everlasting;" of whom Isaiah declared 
that '' He inhabiteth eternity." 

But thirdly, involved in the truth of 
God's eternity, is the doctrine, not only 
that God is, and ever has been, but that 
He ever will be. He who is '* from ever- 
lasting" must be *'to everlasting." It is 
impossible that that which has been, in 
infinite and undiminished life from all eter- 
nity, should ever know diminution or ces- 
sation of being. God can suffer no hurt, 
can experience no decay. He cannot be 
destroyed by another, being omnipotent. 
He cannot destroy Himself, being perfect. 
Therefore we may send our strongest- 
winged imaginations, not only backward 



84 3 Beltcpe in ®o6* 

but forward, and never reach the limita- 
tions of God's endless being. All our cal- 
culations show how futile is the effort to 
compass the thought of God's endless eter- 
nity. 

Men have imagined that one drop in the 
ocean should be removed in a million of 
years, and then, after another million of 
years, one other drop should be taken 
away, until the wide-reaching immensities 
and profundities of the sea had been ex- 
hausted, down to the rocky foundations of 
the great deep ; but such a period of time 
is only one moment with the eternal God. 
Men have imagined a bird sent out to the 
earth, and taking one grain of sand and fly- 
ing far away to the sun, and after a thou- 
sand years, returning for another grain of 
sand, and this long-winged flight continued 
through ages after ages unnumbered, until 
the mighty earth had vanished, and until 
all the other planets had been removed, 



^Ije (EternttY of (Bob. 85 

and until other systems of worlds, beside 
some of which this world is but a speck, 
had been transported and heaped upon our 
sun ; but in God's eternity all this would be 
but an instant, a mathematical moment, 
which, like a mathematical point, has no 
dimensions. The eternity of God, instead 
of ending, would not have suffered the least 
diminution. Eternity is the life-time of 
the Almighty ; existence without begin- 
ning or ending, without birth or death, in- 
fancy or age. He who is from everlasting 
is to everlasting, the high and lofty One, 
inhabiting Eternity. 

From the contemplation which our argu- 
ment has forced upon us, it will be felt. 
First, that the conception of God's eter- 
nity is a most powerful incentive to wor- 
ship, for it is not a part of God that is 
possessed of this sublime attribute, but 
His whole Infinite Nature. His power is 
from everlasting to everlasting. Not one 



86 3 Beltepe in ®ob. 

slightest element of force has ever been 
subtracted, or ever will be taken there- 
from. And so God's knowledge and wis- 
dom are eternal. He has never been 
learning, and He has never forgotten. 
'* Known unto God are all His works from 
eternity." So, too, of His mercy. His jus- 
tice, and His holiness. They are from 
everlasting and they endure forever. In 
him the venerableness of immemorial an- 
tiquity is united with the splendor of im- 
mortal youth. He is the Ancient of Days, 
yet fresh with the dews of an eternal 
morning. We are adding year by year to 
our knowledge and experience, seeking 
new truth and new joy. But we are also 
leaving behind us something of the beauty 
and freshness of life's morning hours. The' 
glory of the splendid dawn dies, as Words- 
worth sings, '* into the light of common 
day." Not so with God ; eternally old, he 
is immortally young ; the same in all His 



Cf?e eternity of ©ob- 87 

adorable perfections, yesterday, to-day, 
and forever, '^without variableness or 
shadow of turning." 

When you see a great and holy man, 
weighted with the wisdom of seventy years, 
venerable with prayer and devout medita- 
tion, a man who has seen two genera- 
tions pass to their echoless graves, you 
stand in reverence before such a life. But, 
while you revere, your sad thought flies 
onward to the swift-coming day, when, 
amid tolling bells and tearful crowds, the 
good man shall be laid away in the ground 
which his footsteps hallowed, and men 
shall mourn that his voice of heavenly 
wisdom is forever silenced. But suppose 
that this man had lived on the earth from 
the beginning of time, had been the con- 
temporary of Adam, and Noah, and Moses, 
and David, and Paul, and Augustine, and 
Luther, and Washington ; suppose that the 
'^good, gray head" was venerable with 



88 3 Believe in (Sob. 

seventy centuries, instead of seventy years, 
of meditation and experience ; suppose 
that he had been the companion of patri- 
archs of the elder world ; that he had 
watched the Syrian stars in the tent-door 
with Abraham, and had sat with Jesus 
beneath the olive-trees outside Jerusalem ; 
suppose he had seen the first stone of the 
Pyramids planted in Egyptian sand, and 
the gilded cross placed above St. Peter's 
dome, and had himself built the first tem- 
ple of Christian worship on the shores of 
America ; and suppose that, with all his 
weight of years, he was still in the hey- 
day of youthful life, and you knew that 
he would yet watch a hundred centuries 
to their death, in the ages to come, until 
his Master had subdued all the earth by 
His reconciling love, with what augmented 
awe and reverence would you salute the 
wise and holy man of God whose life had 
been parallel with the life of humanity. 



g:t?e (EtermtY of ©06. 89 

But what is even such a life to that of 
God ? It is less than the first falling 
sand in the hour-glass. Before creation 
began, God is, the great Jehovah, the 
Eternal, ''I Am," resplendent with the 
power and wisdom and goodness by which 
all worlds came into being, and perfect in 
that holiness that burneth forever, the con- 
suming fire of the all-righteous God, who 
from eternity to eternity doeth no sin and 
sufifereth no change ! 

The ninetieth Psalm, the Psalm of Moses, 
is a trumpet-call to adoration. ** Thou 
hast been our dwelling-place in all gen- 
erations. Before the mountains were 
brought forth or ever Thou hadst formed 
the earth and the world, even from ever- 
lasting to everlasting Thou art God." And 
David answers with a note equally wor- 
shipful, '' They shall perish, but Thou re- 
mainest, and they shall all wax old as doth 
a garment, and as a vesture shaltThou fold 



90 3 Beltepe in ©ob^ 

them up, and they shall be changed. But 
Thou art the same, and Thy years shall 
not fail.'' The mighty evolutions of the 
past, which science is disclosing, are illus- 
trations of God's eternity, calling us to our 
knees. And how we may well commiser- 
ate those in our time, who, gazing at 
these stupendous unfoldings, see no eternal 
Father. 

"Mourn not for them that mourn 

For sin's keen arrow with its rankling smart ; 
God's hand will bind again what he hath torn, 

He heals the broken heart. 
But weep for him whose eye 

Sees in the midnight skies a starry dome, 
Thick sown with worlds that whirl and hurry by, 

Yet give the heart no home ; 
Who marks through earth and space 

A strange dumb .pageant pass before a vacant 
shrine, 
And feels within his inmost soul a place 

Unfilled by the divine." 



Ct?e (EternttY of ©ob. 91 

But, secondly, God's eternity introduces 
the thoughtful heart into a boundless field 
of consolation. When the Archbishop of 
Canterbury left the Cathedral after his 
consecration, the English crowds were 
wont to shout after him, ** Remember 
eternity!" ** Remember eternity!" This 
word of solemn monition I would trans- 
form into a word of comfort, and say to 
every believing heart, wounded by afflic- 
tion and burdened with care, ** Remember 
eternity." It is the habitation of 1jrod. 
From everlasting the Infinite Father has 
been mindful of you, who were '* chosen of 
Him before the foundation of the world," 
and who are not to be snatched from Him 
by the principalities and powers of evil, or 
to be separated from His love in Christ 
Jesus by things present or things to come. 
God's covenant with us is sure, because 
He is eternal. He who hath loved us from 
everlasting abides to everlasting to fulfill 



92 3 Believe in ®ob. 

all His promises. Heaven and earth pass 
away, but the word of the Lord, who is 
eternal, endureth forever. 

Science and revelation both declare that 
this world shall be burned up and become, 
let us suppose, like the gray ashen moon, 
the cinder of a consumed planet. And we 
are far less abiding than this dear old 
world on which the sun has shined so long. 
And what we love most is as transient as 
ourselves. Household friends are borne 
away by the flood of years, *' sweetest 
lives overwhelmed and lost to sight." 
Cherished hopes come forth in vigor — 
fresh buds in May, gorgeous leaves in 
October, dead leaves in December. Storms 
beat on every side, but the children of God 
are joined to an eternal life. The restless 
mutations of earth disturb not the King 
in heaven. Cruelty and persecution have 
smitten the Church of Christ, till hearts 
grew faint, and some eyes have turned to 



tn?e €ternttY of (gob. 93 

the high dome above, expecting the stars 
to whirl from their courses and make a 
*' pathway for the coming Judge." But in 
darkest hours there have not wanted those 
whose faith rested serenely on the un- 
shaken throne of the Eternal God. His 
patience is undisturbed, to whom a thou- 
sand years are but as yesterday, and whose 
*' Providence moves through time," it has 
been said, '* as the gods of Homer through 
space. He makes a step, and ages have 
rolled away." 

Why not throw every burden of life on 
the bosom of Eternal Love ? Sorrow and 
loss rob us of treasure and of joy — but 
our 'best friend is One, who, older than 
the everlasting hills, abides unchanged 
when hills perish in smoke. Our Father 
needs His children and will call them 
home. We are to expect no Buddhist's 
heaven, the dew-drop of life slipping at 
last into the '* shining sea" of a passionless 



94 3 Beltet)e in ©ob. 

repose, but something infinitely sweeter 
and more ennobling, even a conscious im- 
mortality. Let heaven be to you as 
glorious as the Divine Word makes it, 
and think not that your hopes are unreal, 
for the blissful mansions, and the golden 
streets, and the far-gleaming battlements 
of the Christian Zion all rest securely on 
the truth, and the love, and the being of 
the Eternal God. 

And, thirdly, this sublime attribute of 
God is a continuous warning to all wicked- 
ness, disloyalty, and unbelief. Sin ^never 
seems more presumptuous than when 
considered as an affront to the Eter- 
nal God. It is refusing to bow the 
heart to the supremely Adorable. It is 
robbing God of what is due His infinite 
excellence. It is the pride that prefers 
its own way to the counsel of the Everlast- 
ing, who saith, '* Where wast thou when 
I laid the foundations of the earth.?" It 



trF?e (EternttY of (gob. 95 

is the audacity of an insect of the hour 
despising the ancient sun in the heavens. 
It is the conceit of an infant child seizing 
the scepter of government from the hand 
of its reverend Father and King. It is 
worshiping the things which God hath 
made more than the Eternal Creator, 
and this is pouring contempt on Him be- 
fore whom the angels sing with veiled 
faces, '* Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Al- 
mighty, which was, and is, and is to 
come." 

O how wicked and pitiable is the pride 
which affronts God's eternal being, despis- 
ing His eternal law, and defying his 
eternal justice, and which is certain to 
be smitten by His eternal wrath. For if 
our transgressions have not been covered 
over by the Redeemer's blood and thus 
blotted from His book of remembrance, 
then, as the Psalmist declares, they are all 
set, even our secret sins, in the light of His 



96 3 Beltepe in ©ob. 

countenance ; all the iniquities of the past 
of which we may be oblivious, all the greed 
and worldliness which He calls idolatry, 
and all the voluntary rejection of our 
Saviour, are set in the light of His face, to 
whom a thousand years are but as a watch 
in the night. There they are, perpetual 
offences to His eternal holiness, and we 
shall confront them and learn by experi- 
ence infinitely sad that God's warnings are 
not idle words. When a ship is sinking in 
mid-ocean, and the captain informs the 
passengers that in an hour all will be in 
eternity, even hardened natures are im- 
pressed by that solemn word. The great 
Welsh preacher, Christmas Evans, once be- 
gan a sermon in the open fields before a 
congregation of many thousands, by saying 
over and over again, the word which in the 
Welsh language is equivalent to eternity, 
a word which, I am told, is in that lan- 
guage more sonorous and weighty even 



Cl?e (£termtY of ©ob. 97 

than in our own. ''Eternity!" ''Eter- 
nity!" "Eternity!" he said in slow and 
solemn accents, looking at the great multi- 
tude which would soon be beyond the 
realm of earthly changes, and then, with 
eyes uplifted to heaven he spoke the word 
"eternity" thirty times over, until it 
seemed that the other world brought its 
solemnity down upon the waiting multi- 
tude. Men looked at each other with faces 
whitened by fear. Women sobbed and 
prayed, and hundreds cried to God to have 
mercy on their souls ! May God make 
that word mighty to us. May God give 
every one of us that vision of values that 
comes to the dying saint when the breath 
of eternity kisses his face, and he knows 
that while heart and flesh are failing, God 
is the strength of his heart and his portion 
forever. Then he is amazed at the folly 
which, for a moment, could have preferred 
the perishable trifles of earth to the endur- 
7 



98 



3 Beltcpe in ©ob< 



ing treasures of God, and which in so 
many, craves the selfish pleasures which 
are like glittering baubles, before those 
holy joys which are like the durable dia- 
mond ledges underlying the palaces of 
eternity. May the Holy Spirit lead each 
one of us unto Him who is from everlasting 
to everlasting, and who hath revealed to 
us redemption in Jesus Christ, whom to 
know aright is life eternal. 



t 



Cf)c Crutf^ anb Comfort of 
Cf^eism. 



Cf?e CrutI) anb (£omfort of 



** Our Father which art in Heaven.^ ^ 
— Matt, 6:6. 



IN the opening address of the Lord's 
Prayer is given a revelation of God 
beyond which, in its wealth of comfort 
and inspiration, we may not go. *' Our 
Father," is the ultimate address of human- 
ity to God. *' All knowledge which the 
sons of men shall gather in the cycled 
times" cannot add to it a single letter or 
change to sweeter melody its enchanting 
syllables. And this disclosure of the divine 
nature is an authoritative confirmation of 
the convictions', or, perhaps more accu- 

[ loi ] 



102 3 Beltepe in &ob. 

rately, of the hopes of the human mind 
apart from the Scriptures. 

Matter and motion point to God. But 
material elements and motions, however 
marvelous, furnish us no such revelation of 
God as is found in mind, the spirit of man 
that thinks and loves and chooses and 
worships. *' Men," says Lowell, ** go about 
to prove the existence of God. Was it a 
bit of phosphorus, that brain (of Shakes- 
peare) whose creations are so real that 
mixing with them we ourselves appear like 
fleeting magic-lantern shadows .'^^ To an 
undevout soul '* this goodly frame, the 
earth,'' may seem, as it did to the bewil- 
dered Hamlet, only a ** sterile promon- 
tory." ''Even this most excellent canopy, 
the air," this majestical roof, this brave 
o'er-hanging firmament, fretted with golden 
fire, may appear to a dulled sensibility 
only '' a foul and pestilent congregation of 
vapors." But even poor Hamlet was forced 



Ct?e Crutlj anb (Eomfort of Ct^etsm. 103 

to exclaim, in admiration, ''What a piece 
of work is man ! How noble in reason ; 
how infinite in faculties ; in form and mov- 
ing how express and admirable ; in action, 
how like an angel ; in apprehension, how 
like a god ! " And hence we are not slow 
to believe the ancient words attributing 
all to Jehovah : '' Thou hast crowned him 
with glory and honor. Thou hast given 
him dominion over the works of Thy 
hands.'' 

The tiger walks the Indian jungle, 
fiercely conscious of power to attack 
and defend. The lion has his tooth and 
terrible paw and is king over beasts. But 
man has the Spirit of God, and therefore all 
obey him. The monsters crawl at his feet 
subdued. At his touch great common- 
wealths and capitals of civilization spring 
up from the prairie sod ; deserts become gar- 
dens, mountains are leveled or pierced, con- 
tinents are girded with iron, and the storm- 



104 3 Beltepe in ®o6. 

wind harnessed to his flying ships. He 
moves his wand and magnetic wires mur- 
mur through a thousand leagues of sea the 
intelligible speech of nations. He yokes 
the tides of the moon to his mill-wheel, and 
bids the strong earth by gravitation turn 
his million spindles. He magnifies his 
vision so as to peer into atoms and star- 
depths. No ape or elephant ever invented 
a microscope or took out a patent for a 
steam engine. Man alone is lord over 
nature. On him the giants and the fairies 
wait. '* For him," as the poet-philosopher 
of New England has said, *' the diving-bell 
of Memory descends into the deeps of our 
past and oldest experience, and brings up 
every lost jewel." For him Fancy '* sends 
up her gay balloon into the sky to catch 
every gleam and tint of romance." For 
him '' Imagination turns every dull fact 
into picture and poetry by making it the 
emblem of a thought." So that every re- 



Cf)e CrutI} anb Comfort of Cf?etsm. 105 

splendent faculty of our intellectual nature 
becomes a shining finger, pointing, not to 
the star-dust, but to Him who is enthroned 
above the stars, toward whom our hearts 
are uplifted as, taught and inspired by the 
Divine Man of Nazareth, we cry out, in 
filial adoration, ** Our Father who art in 
heaven." 

A stranger from another world, alight- 
ing on our earth, and desiring to learn 
something of the character of the king 
who rules it, might discover in the royal 
gardens sl time-piece moved by water, like 
those contrivances which some of us have 
seen in Switzerland. Examining the 
water-clock, he might learn something of 
the ingenuity of the king or the king*s 
servants. Suppose, however, that the 
king's own son should appear to the celes- 
tial visitor and converse with him about 
this mysterious clock, and explain its mo- 
tions and speak of the solar and sidereal 



106 3 Beltepe in 6ob. 

systems whose movements are represented 
on the face of the dial ; and suppose that 
from this, the young prince should begin to 
reason about the origin of the Universe, 
and should show that his heart had been 
touched by the sublimity and beauty of 
Creation, and should invite the angel to 
kneel with him and adore the Maker and 
Mover of all things ; the heavenly stranger 
would learn from this prince's mind indefi- 
nitely more of the king's nature than from 
any mechanical contrivance, however mar- 
velous. Man is the King's son ; the curi- 
ous time-piece is this system of blazing 
wheels within wheels, which we call Na- 
ture ; and his soul is a nobler and completer 
revelation of the Being of God than all the 
resplendent and revolving galaxies of 
the heavens. 

But in the mind of man we discover con- 
science, the organ and executive of the 
moral law, which declares that right should 



Cf?e Crutf? anb Comfort of Cfjeism. 107 

be chosen and wrong should be avoided, — 
which speaks to us with a supremely- 
authoritative voice : which, in the presence 
of every temptation, pronounces a divine 
negative that loses not one whit of its 
royal supremacy when mated with all the 
allurements of pleasure which beguiled 
Ulysses or Solomon ; and which, when we 
choose the right and refuse the wrong, stirs 
in our hearts a feeling of the approval of 
** Some One above ourselves that makes 
for righteousness." What is the meaning 
of the moral law ? If you ask History, she 
answers, *'God." Pointing to the smoke of 
numberless sacrifices, she declares that men 
have deemed themselves accountable to a 
Supreme Being, and that the moral law is 
the source and occasion of that greatest 
fact of history, Religion. If you ask Phil- 
osophy what it means, she repeats her sub- 
lime axiom that every effect demands an 
adequate cause. The moral law is a stu- 



108 3 Beltere in ®o6. 

pendous effect, and points together with all 
lower effects, to that Supreme First Cause 
for which, as Herbert Spencer has said, '' we 
have more evidence than for any other 
truth whatever." If you make your ap- 
peal to the moral sense itself when touched 
by a feeling of remorse, you get an answer 
in the words of penitent David, ** Against 
Thee and Thee only have I sinned." 

Searching the nature of man we discover 
affections that hunger for a divine love ; 
we discover worshiping instincts and as- 
pirations. Now this religious nature, this 
spiritual instinct, is itself a supreme evi- 
dence of God's being, from the fact that 
if God is not, the instinct is a liar*s finger 
pointing us toward darkness and nothing- 
ness, when we expected to find the Eter- 
nal Father. If there be no God, then 
falsehood has been planted in the very 
center of our nature. But the presump- 
tion is against such an hypothesis. Only 



Cfje Crutfj anb (Eomfort of Cf?et5m. 109 

the most overwhelming evidence could 
satisfy us that this monstrous supposition 
is true, and all the evidence points in the 
opposite direction. The analogies of the 
universe are strongly to the effect that, 
if there exist an organ of knowledge or 
power, or if there be any need in body or 
mind, these have their correlates in fact, 
in Nature. If you find in the fossil's skull 
of the megatherium an enormous eye- 
socket, you know that there once existed 
within that cavity an enormous eye, and, 
believing in the existence of an eye, you 
are confident that far back in the geologic 
ages there was light to correspond with 
that eye. If you see a bird's wing in a 
museum of extinct animals, you know 
there was air on the earth fitted to that 
wing's movements. From the sight of a 
fin you infer water. From the roots of a 
tree you infer soil for them to penetrate ; 
from the long, flexible claws of a bird, 



110 3 Believe in ©06. 

branches for them to cling to. Lungs im- 
ply an atmosphere, feet a solid earth. 
Hunger points to food and thirst to water. 
The study of nature is a disclosure of 
correspondences. Marvelous are the prop- 
erties of light and of sound, and when 
we remember that those vibrations in 
the ether which we call light, and those 
vibrations in the air which we call sound, 
form a language fitted to the soul of man 
and speaking to it in Beethoven's sym- 
phonies and Michael Angelo's frescoes, in 
the martial airs of patriotism and in the 
splendors of Raphael's pencilings, in the 
song of the bird and the beauty of 
the lily, in the thunder of the cataract 
and in the pensive loveliness of a New 
England landscape bathed in the dreamy 
light of October, in the glory of the sun- 
kissed waves and in the *' undying baritone 
of the sea," ministering to human love and 
reverence, suggesting thoughts of joy and 



Cf?e Crutfj anb (Eomfort of Cfjetsm. Ill 

sadness, exalting the heart to courage or 
quieting it with tenderness, or sending it 
upward in strong-winged aspiration toward 
heaven, we are confident that one God 
created the soul and these multitudinous 
and almost spiritual agencies which minis- 
ter to its life. It would seem that Nature 
is a continual response to the spirit of 
man, that she never makes an organ or 
creates a need without supplying its cor- 
relate. Man has a desire for power, here 
is the earth for him to subdue ; he has a 
desire for knowledge, here is the Universe 
for him to study ; he has a sense of the 
beautiful, and lo ! on every hand the fairy 
fingers of Nature have wrought in gor- 
geous dyes and finest fabrics the miracles 
of beauty which the aesthetic instinct 
needs. 

Man is a creature with affections, and 
behold the many objects on which they 
fasten ; father, mother, wife, children, home. 



112 3 Beltere in (Sob, 

country, humanity. But man is also and 
above all a worshiping being, and shall 
he be cheated here, in the very sanctuary 
and palace of his soul ? Is every other 
faculty true and correspondent with the 
nature of things, and this supreme faculty 
a lie, pointing only to illusion and false- 
hood ? The construction of the world 
argues no, and with all its force asserts 
that, if there be a worshiping instinct 
there must be that which it requires. If 
man is a religious being, there must be 
One supremely adorable ; if man is terri- 
fied before a broken moral law and rears 
an altar and puts upon it an expiatory 
sacrifice, there must be Some One, not 
himself and above himself, toward whom 
the moral law is pointing. If humanity, 
with all its sorrows and its baffled hopes 
and undefined longings, is needing an 
infinite Father to soothe and satisfy, and is 
feeling after Him if haply it may find 



Clje ^rutlj anb Comfort of Cfjetsm. 113 

Him, even as a hungry child in the dark- 
ness cries for food and light, then there 
must be an Infinite Father with whom is 
food for love, and in whom is light for the 
soul. 

Thus Christ's revelation comes in to re-in- 
force the best convictions of men and satisfy 
their deepest wants. The need of God, and 
of such a God as Jesus reveals, is so funda- 
mental that you must almost unmake 
human nature itself to destroy its latent 
faith in a Divine Someone who is able to 
right human wrong and to console human 
grief Much of the so-called culture of our 
time is an effort to eliminate God from 
human consciousness by fixing the mind 
on second causes, and by vainly endeavor- 
ing to satisfy the human heart with the 
thought of its own possible development 
in moral excellence, even though life ends 
with the grave. One distinguished man 
has left us an autobiography which is the 



114 3 Belicpe in ©ob, 

story of an attempt to eradicate God from 
the human soul. I scarcely know of a 
sadder or a more instructive book. It is 
only a few years since this great English- 
man, John Stuart Mill, went down to 
his grave, leaving us an account of 
his lifelong education. A political econo- 
mist, the first of his age, a logician equal 
to the greatest, a parliamentary debater, 
an advocate of liberty, a friend of our own 
country in her mortal struggle for exist- 
ence, with a generous and heroic nature, 
cultivated beyond most men of his time, 
John Stuart Mill is doubtless a man worth 
studying, a modern man, our contempo- 
rary, living a fruitful, unselfish, and high- 
minded life. If we look into his career, let 
our examination be without any prejudices 
because he rejected the Christian faith and 
stoutly opposed many of our most cher- 
ished convictions. Let it be with tolerant 
sympathy and a candid desire to know 
whether the need of God is any part of 



^l?e Zvnti} anb (Eomfort of tEIjeism. 115 

human nature. If I wished to assail unbe- 
lief in its strongholds, I would use the 
Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. No 
sensitive man can read the sad story with- 
out crying, **0 God, save me from despair/' 
I am not disposed to belittle this great 
antagonist of Christian philosophy, but 
rather to exalt him. There are enough 
embittered polemics that hate his name. 
The organized wrong of England always 
hated him. Toryism bellowed and brayed 
over his coffin, as it has bellowed and 
brayed over the reverses of many great 
men, from Milton to Gladstone. Let 
us not walk in these ways of bitterness. 
True wisdom seeks out the path of charity, 
^* which the lion's whelp has not trodden 
nor the vulture's eye seen." I am willing 
to learn much from John Stuart Mill, 
remembering his own maxim that '* none 
is more likely to see what you do not, than 
he who does not see what you do." This 
man investigated truth with the boldness 



116 3 Beliepe in ®o5. 

of Socrates and carried into public life a 
conscientious independence as royal as 
Charles Sumner's. He was true to God in 
conscience, though to him it was an un- 
known God. If I viewed only one aspect 
of this life, I should almost be a devotee of 
this great man, who has been described as 
a ** marvelous compound of intellect and 
feeling, of chivalry and logic ; the pene- 
trating genius of Pascal and the generous 
heart of Fenelon, Adam Smith and Bayard, 
Aristotle and Petrarch in one." 

Coming now to his life, as told by him- 
self, we recall that his father, James Mill, 
author of the '' History of British India,'' 
was a man who came to disbelieve Chris- 
tian doctrine, and who held that nothing 
could be known of the origin of things. 
This forceful and accomplished man re- 
solved to train his eldest son, John Stuart 
Mill, in accordance with his own very 
positive ideas. You may remember that, 



' 



Cf?e (Erutf? anb (Eomfort of Cf?et5m. 117 

at the age of three, the boy was set to 
learning Greek, and that before he was 
ten, his father had seen him read far more 
Greek than is required of the graduates of 
American universities. He began Latin 
at eight, and in four years had read the 
masterpieces of Roman literature, besides 
writing a history of Roman law that would 
make an octavo volume. His English 
reading up to this time was enormous, his 
father supervising all his studies and ex- 
plaining the reasons for every task re- 
quired, and to his father the boy recounted 
the substance of his investigations, so that 
knowledge was remorselessly drilled into 
him. He was kept from companionship 
with children, and shut up with men and 
books, so that he early became a ** reason- 
ing machine." 

James Mill took conscientious care that 
his son should acquire his own convictions 
concerning religion. The belief in a per- 



118 3 Beltere in ®o5. 

sonal God was never permitted to develop 
in his mind. It was resolutely repressed. 
''I am thus," said John Stuart Mill/* one 
of the few examples in this country of one 
who has never thrown off a religious be- 
lief, but never had it. I grew up in a 
negative state in regard to it. I looked 
upon modern, as I did upon all ancient 
religion, as something which in no way 
concerned me." In his Autobiography he 
never refers to his mother, and it would 
seem that no impressions were allowed to 
come from her. He was to be trained ra- 
tionally, and by his father's rigorous hand. 
A motherless childhood ! Do you wonder 
that it ushered in a godless manhood ? 
When we think of St. Monica's prayers 
for her son Augustine, when we think of 
the pious petitions of the mothers of 
Wesley and Washington, we believe that 
in the mind of God they outweighed the 
hard philosophies of James Mill. 



Cf?e tErutt} anb Comfort of Cf?etsm. 119 

And yet moral instruction was earnestly 
given to our young scholar. His favorite 
book through life was the *^ Reflections of 
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus," the Roman 
Stoic emperor. He learned to scorn all 
baseness and insincerity. The time came, 
however, when Mill's self-education began, 
and when, instead of the iron hand of his 
father, was his own independent choice. 
And after years of sharp contact with the 
best minds of England, after long courses 
of intellectual discipline which were se- 
verer than any athlete's training for phys- 
sical contests, there came a crisis in his 
mental history. He began to ask, '* For 
what is all this culture ? What is the pur- 
pose of these efforts for the public good ? 
Suppose that you attain all that you are 
seeking, will you be satisfied.'^" He an- 
swered, '* No." *'The whole foundation on 
which my life was constructed fell down." 
He says, *' I seemed to have nothing left 



120 3 Beltepe in ©ob. 



to live for." ** In vain I sought relief in my 
favorite books ; I became persuaded that 
my love of mankind and of moral excellence 
for its own sake had worn itself out ;" and 
then he adds these suggestive words : ** If 
I had loved any one sufficiently to make 
confiding my griefs a necessity, I should 
not have been in the condition I was." I 
cannot help remembering that the Apostle 
Paul's love for mankind and for moral ex- 
cellence never seemed to himself worn out, 
because his heart had been touched by 
God's heart on the Cross, and for him to 
live was Christ. It makes a vast difference 
with man's outlook into life whether or not 
he has received the New Testament revela- 
tion of the divine nature as love. 

If love is the divine artificer and gov- 
ernor of the material, mental, and moral 
universe ; if that blessed name describes 
the heart of the Almighty who awes us 
by the sublimity of his creations ; if love is 



Cf?e Crutfj anb Comfort of Cf?etsm. 121 

the nature of that Being whose continual 
activity in the marvels of earth and sea 
and sky is the life-long study of the natu- 
ralist, the mathematician, and the astrono- 
mer ; if this infinite cosmos is the home 
of an ever-present benevolence, and the 
palpitating ether throbs from star to star 
with the onflowing and everflowing billows 
of love ; if this precious and peculiar grace 
which makes what joy we know on earth, 
has been enthroned in the royalty of su- 
preme and eternal dominion over force 
and law, over the motions of spheres and 
the mutations of time, over national and 
individual life, over our birth and discipline 
and toils and griefs, over our homes and our 
graves, our present and our future ; if all 
the altars built to the unknown God have 
been unconsciously offering incense to this 
innermost and sublimest attribute of deity ; 
if the divine Some One whom Socrates 
and Plato revered, and Eastern poets 



122 3 Beltepe in ©ob. 

worshiped on Persian hilltops, rosy with 
the streamers of the dawn, is best named 
in the language of the Asiatic peasant 
who wrote so confidently that ** God is 
love," then we have a truth and a treasure 
which cheapens the learning of proud uni- 
versities and the diadems of prouder kings. 
Had the soul of John Stuart Mill been 
open, not only to the riches of human 
thought, but to the sight of God's personal 
love, no such plaint as he has recorded 
would have broken from his heart. 

But he escaped from his father's narrow- 
ness and set resolutely to work to cultivate 
the neglected part of his nature, the feel- 
ings. From Christian sources, yet having 
no Christian faith, he fed his emotiona) 
nature. He became the associate of Cole- 
ridge and of John Stirling, of Carlyle and 
of Frederick D. Maurice, *'of all God's men 
late left, the most divine ! " He even 
learned to love the poetry of Wordsworth, 



Cf?e Crutf? anb (Eomfort of Cf?etsm, 123 

who, more than any other modern, per- 
ceived and felt the presence of God in 
Nature. Thus, to a degree, the frozen 
music in this logical machine was thawed 
out. He came to feel that he might re- 
cover from his depression and despair by- 
living for others. We are not surprised 
to find him a chivalrous apostle of the 
oppressed, filled with enthusiasm for hu- 
manity. Let no one think it a discredit 
to the Christian Gospel that the life of 
this unbeliever was a prolonged devotion 
to human welfare, for enthusiasm for man 
is the living inspiration of Christianity, 
and Stuart Mill was unconsciously the 
child of eighteen Christian centuries, '' the 
heir to old Judea's gift of sacred fire," 
living in an atmosphere permeated with 
Christian thought. In his heart there was 
that which paganism did not teach him. 
Unwittingly this student of the heathen 
emperor, Marcus Aurelius, became the 



124 3 Beltepc in ©ob. 

disciple of the Nazarene Jesus. A man 
often walks in the cold light of the Octo- 
ber moon with no grateful thought of the 
sun whose reflected splendor silvers the 
autumn fields. So Mill had much of the 
light of Christianity, without its personal 
warmth and consolation. He cherished 
bright hopes for humanity, but none for 
individual men. These hopes for the race, 
however, are the gifts of Christianity. 
Paganism ever faces the past, and dreams 
of a golden age far back in the twilight 
of history. The Gospel of Christ faces 
the future, and points to a new heaven 
and a new earth '*with joy and love tri- 
umphing and fair truth." Without Chris- 
tianity, Stuart Mill, hopeless for himself 
and the individual, might also have been 
hopeless for the race, and we should think 
of him as a stony sphinx, guarding the 
dull, gray pyramid of a worn-out past, and 
not as a westward-looking prophet whose 



CI?e CrutI} anb (Eomfort of tTtjetsm* 125 

mind, though half-illumined, still thronged 
** with shining auguries, 
Circle on circle, bright as seraphim. 
With golden trumpets silent, that await 
The signal to blow news of good to men." 

We come now to the final stage of Mill's 
culture, and having seen his young mind 
thoroughly emptied of God, having seen 
him cherishing great hopes for the world, 
though none for individuals, and having 
heard him confessing the need of a su- 
preme affection, we are not suprised at this 
latest development. In 1830, at the age of 
twenty-four, he began a friendship, which 
he calls **the honor and chief blessing of 
his existence, as well as the source of a 
great part of all he attempted to do or 
hoped to effect thereafter for human im- 
provement." He was introduced to the lady, 
who after twenty years of friendship, be- 
came, on the death of her husband, his 
wife. She was not deemed a remarkable 



126 3 Beltere in ®ob. 

woman by others, but with more than the 
usual enthusiasm of love, John Stuart Mill 
believed that he had found in her a com- 
bination of all the finest qualities he had 
known in the greatest men. This cool- 
headed philosopher deliberately writes that 
she was '*more of a poet than Carlyle" and 
" more of a thinker than himself." ** Her 
mind included Carlyle's," and, he adds, 
"infinitely more." He devoutly believed 
her to be possessed of the qualities, in- 
tellectual and moral, of a *^ consummate 
artist, a great orator, an eminent ruler and 
spiritual leader of mankind." In her "the 
strongest justice was linked with boundless 
generosity and lovingness ; " **the most 
genuine modesty was combined with the 
loftiest pride." "Her sincerity and sim- 
plicity were absolute," and Mill says that 
his intellectual indebtedness to her was 
"almost infinite." He detected no flaw 
in the perfection of her wisdom and no 



tTEje Crutlj anb Comfort of CI?et5m, 127 

slightest stain on the beauty of her char- 
acter. For her he scorned the scorn of 
English society, and, though pure as the 
day, neglected its usages. To her this 
positive philosopher gave himself with a 
devotion as fervent as was ever given to 
the Virgin Mary. Of her he writes almost 
as St. John might have written of the Lord 
Christ. Who can read without astonish- 
ment, and almost without tears, the dedi- 
cation of the Essay on Liberty ! **To the 
beloved and deplored memory of her who 
was the inspirer and in part the author of 
all that is best in my writings, the friend 
and wife whose exalted sense of truth and 
right was my strongest incitement, and 
whose approbation was my chief reward, 
I dedicate this volume. . . . Were I but 
capable of interpreting to the world one- 
half the great thoughts and noble feelings 
which are buried in her grave, I should be 
the medium of a greater benefit to it than 



128 3 Beltere in ®ob. 

is ever likely to arise from anything that 
I can write unprompted and unassisted by 
her all but unrivaled wisdom." 

In 185 1, Stuart Mill was married to this 
idol in whose mind he could ^Metect no 
mixture of error." For seven and a half 
years the devotee and his saint belonged 
to each other, and then she was taken to 
the God in whom she also did not believe. 
** For seven and a half years," says the 
Autobiography, ** that blessing was mine ; 
for seven and a half only. I can say 
nothing which could describe, even in the 
faintest manner, what that loss was and is. 
But because I know that she would have 
wished it, I endeavor to make the best of 
what life I have left, and work on for her 
purposes with such diminished strength as 
may be derived from thoughts of her 
and communion with her memory." That 
memory became his religion. She had 
been laid to rest in the south of France, 



C{?e CrutI? anb Comfort of Cf?etsm. 129 

in sunny Avignon, and year after year 
this remorseless logician went thither and 
wept over her grave. Amid the cypress 
trees he walked, and looking vainly to the 
east and the west, the north and the south, 
he cried an exceeding great and bitter cry, 
that seems an echo of Mary's voice from 
the garden : ** They have taken away my 
Lord, and I know not where they have 
laid Him." 

You ask me. What does all this mean ? 
It means that John Stuart Mill's heart had 
revenged itself; that he who had no God 
to love had clothed with divine perfections 
a creature of God and worshiped that. 
And is there anything sadder than this ? 
A chivalrous soul, blind to God, gives its 
great affections to one human being, whom 
love deified, and losing her, cares to live 
only because she wished it, and derives 
strength only from communion with her 
memory ! A son of God living on the 
9 



130 3 Beltepe in (Sob. 

recollection of a brief gladness that could 
never return, for no flower of hope bloomed 
on the sunny grave in Avignon. ** Truly 
if in this life only we have hope, we are of 
all men most miserable." Many a martyr 
going to the stake repeating the words of 
the Son of Mary, *' I am the Resurrection 
and the Life," is far less pitiable than this 
blight-smitten philosopher without God 
and hence without hope in the world. 
** Among those born of women" in these 
latter days, there has scarcely risen a 
greater than John Stuart Mill. Neverthe- 
less in privilege and hope, ** he who is 
least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater 
than he." 

Mill's broken heart might have envied 
the faith in God which has made the cabin 
of many a dying slave the vestibule of 
immortality. Had not the great logician 
met a logic sterner than his own, that of 
Death ? Does not human need equalize 



Ctje (ErutI? anb Comfort of Ctjetsm, 131 

all and demonstrate religion ? It has been 
said that ''the theorizing of ages is com- 
pressed as in a seed, in the momentary 
want of a single mind." And who of us 
could stand with the despairing philoso- 
pher by that grave in Southern France, 
without praying that his heart might open 
to David's God who never dies and who 
alone satisfieth the longing soul ? The life 
which began without God ended without 
Him. A deified friend assumed the place 
of Jehovah, except that the one faded as a 
leaf, while the other is from everlasting to 
everlasting. And I cannot point to this 
nineteenth century argument for the truth 
and comfort of Christian theism without a 
vain regret that Mill had not omitted a few 
volumes of Greek and Roman history from 
his father's library and early learned the 
Lord's Prayer, '' at that best Academe, a 
mother's knee," for then his life might have 
ended with Paul's, Milton's, Bunsen's, at 



132 3 Belicpe in ©06. 

the sapphire gates of the New Jerusalem, 
and not in despair at the marble jaws of a 
sepulcher. 

The foremost need of every soul is to 
accept in full confidence Christ's revelation 
of God. We who say '* Our Father" must 
also add, *' Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy 
Kingdom come. Thy will be done." God 
is. Everything affirms that. He is near 
to us. The moral law declares that. He 
is our Father, Christ has revealed it. Our 
hearts know it. We need Him. Our lives 
tell us that. Then why not speak to Him, 
asking His help and pity and pardon ? 
Why not go in every doubt and darkness 
to Him who is the light itself? Is it any 
dishonor to seek wisdom from Him to 
whom prayer has been offered by Dante 
and Copernicus, Kepler and Pascal, Sir 
Isaac Newton and Linnaeus and Faraday ? 
I seem yet to see on an island-shore a 
great man's head bowed in prayer. He 



Cf}e Crutt? anb domfort of Cf?etsm, 133 

is no common mind. ** To be in his pres- 
ence an hour," it was said of him, ^'was to 
gain the strongest argument for the im- 
mortality of the soul." A great poet has 
pictured his ** forehead high and round, a 
cairn which every science helped to build." 
It is Agassiz with his pupils about 
him, the master and his school, standing 
before Nature. This man is no fanatic. 
The ages of human culture roll their wealth 
to his feet as the Atlantic rolls its tides. 
His life's study has been matter, but he 
knows with Lord Bacon that mind is be- 
hind it. He has watched the miracle of 
moving life in star-fish and eagle. And he 
knows with his master Aristotle, that all 
motion has its origin in will. And there 
he stands, child of the nineteenth century, 
on the Ocean's shore. 

** Over rock and isle and glistening bay 
Falls the beautiful white day." 



134 3 Beltepe in (Sob, 

The master is about to speak to his 
scholars. Will he say, '' Study Nature, 
trusting to yourselves, leaving all super- 
stition behind you. God is unknown and 
unknowable " ? 

''Said the Master to the youth, 
We have come in search of truth, 
Trying with uncertain key 
Door by door of mystery ; 
We are reaching through His laws 
To the garment-hem of cause, 
Him, the endless, unbegun, 
The Unnameable, the One 
Light of all our light the source. 
Life of life, and force of force. 
By past efforts unavailing. 
Doubt and error, loss ana failing. 
Of our weakness made aware. 
On the threshold of our task 
Let us light and guidance ask. 
Let us pause in silent prayer. 
Then the Master in his place, 
Bowed his head a little space, 



CI}e CrutI? anb (Eomfort of tEf?eisnu 135 

And the leaves, by soft airs stirred, 
Lapse of wave and cry of bird, 
Left the solemn hush unbroken 
Of that wordless prayer unspoken. 
While its wish on earth unsaid 
Rose to heaven interpreted." 

Agassiz is dead, but flowers of hope 
bloom about the rough Alpine boulder 
which marks his grave in Mount Auburn, 
flowers which blossom not above that 
grave in Southern France. But being 
dead he yet speaketh, speaketh of a life 
beyond, in which he believed, and of which 
his great spirit was a prophecy. 

'* In the lap of sheltering seas 
•^ Rests the Isle of Penikese ; 

But the lord of the domain 
Comes not to his own again : 
Where the eyes that follow, fail. 
On a vaster sea his sail 
Drifts beyond our beck and hail ; 



136 3 Beltepe in (Sob, 

But one name forevermore 
Shall be uttered o 'er and o 'er 
By the waves which kiss that shore. 
Thither love shall tearful turn, 
Friendship pause uncovered there, 
And the wisest reverence learn 
From the Master's silent prayer." 



Fruitless is all know^ledge if it does not 
lead us in adoration or in penitence to our 
knees. The knowledge of God is a terror 
and despair, if his children may not speak 
to Him. We have ascended the golden 
steps which lead to our Father^s threshold ; 
let us entreat Him to open the door that 
his glory may smite our faces. Let us 
seek His mercy, lest when His anger is 
kindled but a little, we be utterly con- 
sumed. Let all who believe that God is, 
test Him now and henceforth if Heheareth 
and answereth prayer. 



Ct?e Cruttj anb Comfort of Ctjctsm. 137 

** For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a bUnd Hfe within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they Hft not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
For so the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 



fhe New Enlarged and Authorized Edition of a Remarkable Worb 

THE CHRISTIAN'S 

SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE. 



This Work, the demand for which 
has been so great as to wear out two 
sets of plates, has now been put in 
entirely new form. The book hav- 
ing become an accepted classic in de- 
votional literature, it was thought 
wise to issue this new edition in a 
compact form, and in a variety of 
bindings. Occasion has also been 
taken by the author to thoroughly re- 
vise the whole work, besides adding 
considerable new matter. 



Few Books of a Religious Character have been 
accorded such Hearty and Universal En- 
dorsement from all Denominations. 

•* To commend this work would seem almost superfluous; 
and yet to young Christians who may not know it, we can- 
not refrain from saying, Buy this book, and keep it with 
your Bible for constant study, until you have thoroughly 
mastered, in your own experience, the * secret ' of which it 
tells. It will transform the dark days of your life, as it 
has transformed those of thousands before you, into days 
of heavenly light." — New York Evangelist 

** We have not for years read a book with more delight 
and profit. The author has a rich experience, and tells it 
in a plain and delightful manner." — Christian Advocate, 

The " Handy Classic Edition." 18mo, 292 pages as follows : 

Each in separate box, gilt edge, round corners, except No. 3. 




No. 3, Cloth, full gilt edges..$ 85 
4, French Morocco, Seal 

Grain 1 50 

6, French Morocco, Rus- 

tic Gold Bands 1 50 

7, White Enamel, Easter 

or Wedding Edition. 1 50 



No, 8, Persian Calf, Broken 

Glass Pattern $1 75 

10, Calf, plain 2 00 

12, Best German Calf 

Embossed 2 25 

14, Best German Calf 

Padded 2 50 

The "Standard Edition." 12mo, 240 pages as follows : 

No.Ol Paper covers 50 | No. 02 Cloth, fine 76 

No. 03 Cloth, full gilt edges 1 00 

voRK.;; Fleming H. Revell Company ::chxcago. 



Works of D. L. MOODY. 




**By the strenuous cultivation of 
his gift Mr. Moody has attained 
to a clear and incisive style which 
preachers ought to study; and he 
has the merit, which many more 
cultivated men lack, of saying 
nothing that does not tend to the 
enforcement of the particular 
truth he is enunciating. He 
knows how to disencumber his 
text of all extraneous matter, and 
exhibits his wisdom as a preacher 
hardly less by what he leaves out 
than by what he includes. Apart 
from its primary purpose each of 
these books has a distinct value 
as a lesson on homiletics to min- 
isters and students." — 

Thg Christian Leader. 



SOVEREIGN GRACE. 
BIBLE CHARACTERS. 

PREVAILING PRAYER; WHAT HINDERS IT. 30th Thouiand. 
TO THE WORK! TO THE WORK! A Trumpet Call. 30th Thousand. 
THE WAY TO GOD AND HOW TO FIND IT. 105th Thousand. 
HEAVEN; its Hope ; its Inhabitants ; its H^ppines*- , its Riches ; its 
Reward. 125th Thousand. 

SECRET POWER ; or, the Secret of Success in Christian Life and 

Wof»v. 72d Thousand. 

rjELVfu SELECT SERMONS. 165th Thousand. 

The above are bound in uniform style and price. Paper covers» 
30 cents; cloth, 60 cents. Also the eight books are bound in four 
volumes. Price of Set, in neat box, $4.00. 



DANIEL, THE PROPHET. 10th Thousand. Paper cover, 20c. ; cloth, 

40c. 
THE FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 7th Thousand. Some thoughts 

on Christian confidence. Paper cover, 15c.; cloth, 25c. 

THE WAY AND THE WORD. 65th Thousand. Comprising " Regen- 
eration," and " How to Study the Bible." Cloth, 25c.; paper, 15c. 

HOW TO STUDY THE BIBLE. 45th Thousand. Cloth, 15c.; paper, 10c. 
THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST. 45th Thousand. Paper, 10c. 
INQUIRY MEETINGS, By Mr. Moody and Maj. Whittle. Paper, 15c. 
GOSPEL BOOKLETS. By D. L. Moody. 12 separate sermons. 

Published in small, square form, suitable for distribution, or inclos- 
ing in letters. 35 cents per dozen, $2.50 per hundred. May be had 
assorted or of any separate tract. 



CHICAGO. 



FleminE H. Reyell Conuany. 



NEW YORK. 



A SUGGESTION ^^"^ ^^' *^^ ^^^ volume ana see what a mine of 



want the full set. 



wealth is in these " Notes." You will surely 



"C. H.M.'s" NOTES, 

OR 

THE GOSPEL IN THE PENTATEUCH 




These Books are not Comment 
taries, in the ordinary under- 
standing of that word ; they are 
of a more popular style ; helpful, 
suggestive, inspiring. 



GENESIS, EXODUS, LEVITICUS, 

NUMBERS AND DEUTERONOMY. 
Read thefollowing Commendations from well-known 
Pastors, Evangelists, Laymen, EtCt 

''Some years since 1 had my attention called to C. H. 
M.'s Notes, and was so much pleased, and at the same 
time profited by the way they opened up Scriptural 
truths, that I secured at once all the writings of the 
same author. The^ have been to me a very key to the 
Scriptures.'' D. L. MOODY. 

** Under God they have blessed me more than any 
books outside of the Bible itself, that I have ever read, 
and have led me to a love of the Bible that is proving 
an unfailing source of profit." 

maj. d. w. whittle. 

Deuteronomy is issued in two volumes, the others complete in one 
volume each. 

Separate volumes may be had if desired, 
address on receipt of price. 



Sent post paid to any 



TAe complete set in six volumes^ covering over 2^yx> Pages y ii 
offered at the reduced price of 1^^, per Vol. OF $4.60 per Set. 



Nev Tori FIEMING H. BEVELL CO. Chicago. 



POPCIAS GOMMENTABIES. 




Please notice that this is 
the ONLY Commentary upon 
the whole Bible published at 
a moderate price. It is, 
therefore, witljin reach of 
everyone, while no Com- 
mentary published is so 
highly commended or so well 
adapted for the home, the 
teacher or the preacher, 
when a practical, concise, 
critical and spiritual work 
is desired. 

In the critical Biblical lit- 
erature of the century, few 
books have been so unquali 
fiedly indorsed as 



Jamieson, Fausset & Brown's Commentary 

On the Old and New Testaments. It has been tried, 
tested and proven, during one of the most active periods 
ever known in Biblical research. That it has not been 
found wanting is evident in the still unabated demand. At 
considerable outlay we have issued a new edition of this 
valuable work, in clear type, attractively bound, and at a 
price much lower than any complete commentary ever be- 
fore issued. 

In extra fine English Cloih, sprinkled edges, 

the full set (4 vols.), $8.00. 

In Half Morocco, the full set (4 vols), - - 10,00. 

"The BEST condensed Commentary on the whole Bible 
is the Commentary on the Old and New Testaments by 
Jamieson Fausset and Brown. It contains notes of the 
choicest and richest character on all parts of the Holy Bible. 
It is the cream of the Commentaries carefully collected by 
three eminent scholars. Its critical introduction to each book 
of Scripture, its eminently practical notes, its numerous pic- 
torial illustrations, commend it strongly to the Sunday- 
school worker and to the clergyman. Then it is such a 
marvel of cheapness." — Rt. Rev. J. H. ViNCENT, D. D., in 
'Aids to Bible Study:' 
The leading clergymen and college professors of the country unite 
with Bishop Vincent in placing this Commentary in the first rank of all 
Biblical aids. 

CHICAGO. FMns H. ReTell Company. newyo«k. 



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